{"id":188951,"date":"2021-07-26T12:00:28","date_gmt":"2021-07-26T11:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=188951"},"modified":"2021-07-19T08:20:02","modified_gmt":"2021-07-19T07:20:02","slug":"the-new-cold-war-on-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/07\/the-new-cold-war-on-china\/","title":{"rendered":"The New Cold War on China"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>1 Jul 2021 – <\/em>On March 24, 2021, a high-profile article proclaiming \u201cThere Will Not Be a New Cold War\u201d appeared in Foreign Affairs<\/i>, the flagship publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, the principal think tank for U.S. grand strategy. The author, Thomas Christensen, a professor of international affairs at Columbia University and former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the George W. Bush administration, went so far as to acknowledge that \u201cthe [Donald] Trump administration basically declared a cold war on China.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nevertheless, no New Cold War, Christensen optimistically indicated, would actually materialize, since Washington under Joe Biden would presumably back away from Trump\u2019s extreme policies toward China given its \u201cvital position in the global value chain.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a> Beijing could not be seen as an aggressive power in ideological or geopolitical terms, but was simply interested in economic competition.<\/p>\n

Yet, what Christensen\u2019s analysis excluded was any mention of the imperialist world system, crowned by U.S. hegemony, which is now threatened by China\u2019s seemingly inexorable rise and pursuit of its own distinctive sovereign project.3<\/sup><\/a> In this respect, the Trump administration\u2019s prosecution of a New Cold War on China was no anomaly, but rather the inevitable U.S. response to China\u2019s rise and the end of Washington\u2019s unipolar moment. Just as the United States declared a Cold War against the Soviet Union and China in the 1940s and \u201950s, as part of a grand strategy to secure its global hegemony in the immediate post-Second World War era, today it is declaring a New Cold War on China in the interest of maintaining that same imperial hegemony.<\/p>\n

Indeed, days before Christensen\u2019s Foreign Affairs<\/i> article went to print declaring that there would be no New Cold War, the Biden administration made it clear that it not only intended to continue the New Cold War, but to accelerate it, pushing it to greater heights. This was evident in the first high-level bilateral talks between the United States and the Peoples\u2019 Republic of China following the election of Biden as U.S. president, held on March 18, 2021, in the Captain Cook Hotel in downtown Anchorage, with U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken and national security advisor Jake Sullivan sitting across from China\u2019s director of the Office of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi and Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi.4<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In the week prior to this high-level meeting, Washington had set the stage, signaling through its actions its intention to promote a hyper-aggressive Cold War 2.0 directed at China. Thus, on March 12, Biden met with the heads of state of Japan, India, and Australia, representing the new Quad military-strategic alliance led by the United States, widely seen as an attempt to construct an Asian analogue to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Quad issued a joint statement the entire subtext of which was enmity toward China.5<\/sup><\/a> On the same day, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission blacklisted five Chinese companies including Huawei.6<\/sup><\/a> Late on March 16, less than two days before the bilateral talks with China were set to begin, the Biden administration renewed sanctions against twenty-four officials of the Chinese government, in response to the suppression of dissent in Hong Kong.7<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In a break with diplomatic protocol, Blinken started off the March 18 bilateral talks in Anchorage by bluntly stating that he and the U.S. secretary of defense Lloyd Austin had just returned from a meeting with their counterparts in Japan and Korea, two U.S. leading military allies that share many of Washington\u2019s concerns with regard to China. Washington\u2019s goal, he said, was \u201cto advance the interests of the United States and to strengthen the rules-based international order.\u201d He then entered into a direct challenge to Beijing, referring to \u201cdeep concerns with actions by China, including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyberattacks on the United States and economic coercion toward our allies. Each of these actions threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability.\u201d The United States was ready not only to be competitive, and in some areas \u201ccollaborative,\u201d with China, but also to be strongly \u201cadversarial\u201d where necessary.<\/p>\n

Sullivan followed up by pointedly referring to Biden\u2019s hosting of \u201cthe Quad leaders\u2019 summit\u201d the previous week, and the Quad military alliance\u2019s security concerns in the Indo-Pacific, thereby foregrounding the warlike pact being formed in Asia against Beijing. He added that U.S. allies and partners had expressed \u201careas of concern\u201d with respect to China\u2019s use of \u201ceconomic and military coercion\u201d in its \u201cassaults on basic values\u201d and that the United States would welcome \u201cstiff competition\u201d with China, but that it was also, he intimated, prepared for full-scale conflict.8<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Beijing has continually sought to defuse the tensions and avert the new Cold War that many are predicting.
China Daily, October 28, 2018.<\/p><\/div>\n

Yang responded by insisting that China firmly upheld \u201cthe United Nations-centered international system and the international order underpinned by international law, not what is advocated by a small number of countries [as] the so-called rules-based international order.\u201d \u201cThe Chinese people,\u201d he said, \u201care wholly rallying around the Communist Party of China. Our values are the same as the common values of humanity. Those are: peace, development, fairness, justice, freedom, and democracy.\u201d He stressed the quite different conceptions of democracy represented by China and the United States. Contrasting Beijing\u2019s foreign policy to that of Washington, both historically and in the present, he stated:<\/p>\n

We do not believe in invading through the use of force, or to topple other regimes through various means, or to massacre the people of other countries.\u2026 The United States has exercised long-arm jurisdiction and suppression and overstretched [its] national security through the use of force or financial hegemony, and this has created obstacles for normal trade activities, and the United States has also been persuading some countries to launch attacks on China.\u2026 With [respect to] Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan, they are [each] an inalienable part of China\u2019s territory. China is firmly opposed to U.S. interference in China\u2019s internal affairs. We have expressed our staunch opposition to such interference, and we will take firm actions in response.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yang insisted that Washington had no basis to lecture Beijing on human rights given its own record, as symbolized by the protests of the Black Lives Matter movement. \u201cThe United States itself does not represent international public opinion, and neither does the Western world.\u201d With respect to \u201ccyberattacks,\u201d he stated, \u201cwhether it\u2019s the ability to launch cyberattacks or the technologies that could be deployed, the United States is the champion in this regard. You can\u2019t blame this problem on somebody else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wang, in turn, indicated that<\/p>\n

China urges the U.S. side to fully abandon the hegemonic practice of willfully interfering in China\u2019s internal affairs.\u2026 And in particular on the 17th of March [the day before the meeting], the United States escalated its so-called sanctions on China regarding Hong Kong, and the Chinese people are outraged by this gross interference in China\u2019s internal affairs and the Chinese side is firmly opposed to it.\u2026 Just the other day, before our departure, the United States passed these new sanctions. This is not supposed to be the way one should welcome his guests [in these bilateral talks taking place in Alaska], and we wonder if this is a decision made by the United States to try to gain some advantage in dealing with China.9<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Blinken retorted by referring again to questions raised by U.S. allies and partners with respect to China\u2019s actions in violation of the rules-based international order. He emphasized Washington\u2019s determination to build strategic alliances directed at China. Sullivan then touted U.S. technological prowess and its landing, a couple weeks before, of another rover on Mars, working with its allies in Europe\u2014a comment designed to deflate in advance China\u2019s planned landing of its rover Tianwen [Questions to Heaven] 1 on Mars, to take place in May. He harshly criticized the Chinese delegation for its \u201clectures\u201d and \u201clong, winding statements.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Yang responded that he had \u201cfelt compelled to make this speech because of the tone on the U.S. side,\u201d in which the U.S. diplomats chose \u201cto speak to China in a condescending way from a position of strength,\u201d with all the appearance of having carefully \u201cplanned\u201d and \u201corchestrated\u201d this confrontation. Wang followed by returning to Blinken\u2019s veiled reference to Japan and South Korea regarding their concerns about coercion from China. He indicated that it was not clear whether this was actually coming from these countries themselves or was simply a U.S. projection.11<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cFor an astonished press, witnessing the [entire] exchange,\u201d as Thomas Wright, a Brookings Institution senior fellow, observed shortly after in the Atlantic<\/i>, it \u201cwas like being present at the dawn of a new cold war.\u201d12<\/sup><\/a> Indeed, as David Stilwell, former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under Trump, and Dan Negrea, senior associate of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote ten days later in the National Interest<\/i>: \u201cThirty years after the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the world finds itself in a new cold war\u201d centered on China.13<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Washington continued in the following weeks with its aggressive attacks on China:<\/p>\n