advertisement

Menu Weekly edition The world in brief Search Subscribe My Economist

United States | Decoding the detente

advertisement

The fault lines in America’s China

policy
How to make sense of the cacophony inside and outside the White House

image: getty images/the economist

May 16th 2023 | palo alto and washington, dc Share

advertisement
Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.

00:00 00:00

T he contest between America and China has a postmodern look to it.

Whereas presidents tried to isolate and contain the Soviet Union, America is
economically entwined with China, the current would-be hegemon. The official
government posture on Taiwan is “strategic ambiguity”, a line so confusing that
President Joe Biden has rewritten it several times. Perhaps that is why Jake
Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, reached for the example of the
world’s most famous postmodernist architect when trying to explain the
administration’s industrial and trade policies. “The way that we are going to build
an international economic architecture is not going to be with Parthenon-style
clear pillars as we did after the end of the second world war, but something that
feels a little bit more like Frank Gehry.”

Mr Sullivan met Wang Yi, a senior Chinese foreign-policy official, for more than
eight hours in Vienna last week, which suggests a mutual willingness to prevent
the world’s most important bilateral relationship from getting even worse. That
meeting followed speeches by Mr Sullivan and Janet Yellen, the treasury secretary,
outlining the administration’s thoughts about China. Both speak for the same
boss. But parse the remarks closely, and differences within the administration are
clear.

advertisement

Whereas Mr Sullivan is already sketching his curvilinear “new Washington

consensus”, Ms Yellen says that America is simply calling for “the very same
international order that helped make China’s economic transformation possible”.
Mr Sullivan resoundingly criticised the trade liberalisation of the 1990s and the
“China shock” to manufacturing jobs that followed. No such critiques can be
found in Ms Yellen’s thinking, which aims for “healthy economic engagement that
benefits both countries”.

The two are on opposite ends of the administration’s approach towards China—
with Ms Yellen the (lonesome) dove and Mr Sullivan the (influential) hawk. And
yet both in their own way are trying to sound notes of conciliation. The Biden
administration, perhaps fearing that it has let relations with China sour too
quickly, is publicly trying to pull back.

The low point came in late January, after a Chinese balloon was spotted in
American airspace, loitering around sensitive nuclear-weapons bases before Mr
Biden ordered it shot down off the coast. America’s military leaders were unable to
reach their Chinese counterparts through the kinds of hotline channels that were
in regular use during the cold war with the Soviet Union. The incident nixed a trip
to China that Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, had been planning, which
would have included a meeting with President Xi Jinping. The thaw in tensions
that followed Mr Biden’s meeting with Mr Xi in Bali in November 2022 proved
brief.

There is now a desire to return to something like the “spirit of Bali”. But members
of the administration have complicated aims: to prevent China invading Taiwan,
to preserve trade but with more carve-outs for national security, and to lead the
world in managing climate change and debt crises in emerging markets. They
believe America and China can work together on Ukraine. To explain this in a
non-threatening way they resort to soothing slogans: “competition not conflict”;
“de-risking not decoupling”; leaving trade open except for “a small yard and high
fence”.

What do these phrases actually mean?

Intothered
Export controls on high-end
UnitedStates,tradeingoodswithChina,$bn
semiconductors that could be used in
200
Chinese weapons systems are one
Exports 0
thing. But the restrictions the
Imports
administration is mulling with the aim
Tradedeficit
200 of maintaining a lead on ai, quantum
computing, clean-energy production
400 and biotechnology are a sign that the
small yard may be larger than
600 advertised. Military hawkishness and
TT

1990 95 2000 05 10 15 22
protectionist impulses are strong in
Source:CensusBureau
America. Even if Mr Biden seeks a
TheEconomist
middle road, he may find himself
pushed by these forces, particularly as the presidential election of 2024 looms.

Another difficulty for the White House in setting a national China policy is that
America’s politics are decentralised and raucous. State lawmakers can go it alone,
burnishing their credentials by sounding hawkish. On May 8th Ron DeSantis, the
governor of Florida and possible presidential candidate, signed a law to expunge
“the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party” by limiting the ability of
Chinese nationals to buy land in the state and barring state universities from
accepting foreign funds from countries “of concern”.

advertisement

Nor does the executive branch have any control over the legislative one. Last
August Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the House, visited Taiwan over Mr Biden’s
objections. Kevin McCarthy, her Republican successor, has proceeded with more
caution, meeting the Taiwanese president, Tsai Ing-Wen, during a visit to
California rather than inflaming tensions by repeating Ms Pelosi’s stunt.
“Discerning…the real nature of us policy towards China, I do think has become
harder for Beijing,” says Christopher Johnson of the Centre for Strategic and
International Studies, a think-tank. “You hear from Chinese counterparts a lot of
concern about what they see coming out of the Hill.”

In January a group of 19 House Republicans introduced a resolution to end the

formal “One China” policy that America adheres to and recognise Taiwan as an
independent country. A bipartisan bunch of senators have proposed legislation
that could allow the secretary of commerce to ban TikTok, a wildly popular
Chinese-owned social-media platform.

House Republicans have set up a select committee on the Chinese Communist

Party that has been gathering evidence on sensitive matters like forced labour for
Uyghurs and the Communist Party’s efforts to install police stations abroad. So far
there has been rather unusual agreement between the committee’s Republican
chairman, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, and the senior Democratic member, Raja
Krishnamoorthi of Illinois.

One member of the committee who hopes to introduce some serious debate is Ro
Khanna, a Democrat from California. “I would argue right now that the
Democratic response has been rudderless on the committee…It’s been dominated
by a vision that presupposes a cold war,” he says. “I think there are three places
you can be,” he adds. “One is Donald Trump: let’s just have a complete ban and
decoupling. The other …is Janet Yellen, which is: no decoupling, we just need to
continue almost status quo economically. And then the ground I’m trying to
articulate is: we need a rebalancing…the status quo didn’t work.”

Mr Khanna, who recently gave a speech on China at Stanford, wants to reduce the
bilateral trade deficit to near-zero over the next decade, and renew China’s most-
favoured-nation trading status annually, instead of allowing it to be
permanent. Free-marketeers argue that this would backfire. “The common mistake
of Khanna and Trump and some of the people advising the Biden administration
is the idea that the us alone determines the world,” argues Adam Posen, president
of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

It suits the administration to give prominence to Ms Yellen when it is trying to

reduce the risk of a miscalculation and to reassure allies. She may visit China
before long, as may Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary. Yet the White
House is trying to balance contradictory impulses. To stretch Mr Sullivan’s
architectural analogy to breaking point, the result could turn out to be like Mr
Gehry’s weird but harmonious concert hall in Los Angeles. Or it could be so
impractical that, like Mr Gehry’s computer-science school at mit, the building
leaks and its architect gets sued. ■

Stay on top of American politics with Checks and Balance, our weekly subscriber-only
newsletter, which examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter
to voters. For more coverage of Joe Biden’s presidency, visit our dedicated hub and
follow along as we track shifts in his approval rating.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Decoding the detente"

United States
May 20th 2023

→ The fault lines in America’s China policy

→ What do George Santos, R. Kelly and FIFA have in common?

→ Pinball is booming in America, thanks to nostalgia and canny

marketing

→ Anoint my caverns with oil

→ Congress should fund the BLM (no, not that one)

→ San Francisco’s “woke maths” experiment

→ It turns out that Democrats bus migrants, too

From the May 20th 2023

edition
Discover stories from this section
and more in the list of contents

⇒ Explore the edition

Share Reuse this content

the economist today

Handpicked stories, in your inbox

A daily newsletter with the best of our journalism

Sign up

More from United States

Lots of state legislators believe any contact with

fentanyl is fatal
(It is not)

The White House unveils a pair of bad policies to

woo voters
Tariffs for steelworkers and loan forgiveness for students are both
regressive

Truth Social is a mind-bending win for Donald

Trump
And disturbing evidence of how he destabilises reality for Americans

Subscribe Keep updated

Published since September 1843 to take part in “a severe
Corporate subscriptions contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an
Reuse our content unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”
Help and contact us

The Economist The Economist Group

About The Economist Group Economist Impact Events Economist Education

Courses
Advertise Economist Intelligence Working here
Executive Jobs
Press centre Economist Impact

To enhance your experience and ensure our website runs smoothly, we use cookies and similar technologies. Manage Cookies

Terms of Use Privacy Cookie Policy Accessibility Modern Slavery Statement Sitemap Your Data Rights Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2024. All rights reserved.

Get invaluable analysis of global events. Try for free