Talking to a China in Disarray

The Obama administration is nothing if not persistent when it comes to wooing the Chinese. Beginning Wednesday, American officials are hosting their Beijing counterparts for the fifth round of the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Washington. 

The large get-together—hundreds of officials on each side have attended previous sessions—comes a month after the “shirtsleeves summit” between President Obama and Xi Jinping, China’s newly installed supremo. That event, despite high hopes on the American side, proved to be a bust. At the time, then National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, in his post-summit press briefing, put his best face on what happened, but he inadvertently revealed how bad things went when he spent almost all his time telling us what Obama said to Xi, omitting what Xi told Obama.

The failure of the informal gathering in June should have been a warning. The thinking behind last month’s event was that the formality of past summits made meaningful conversation difficult. Administration officials believed the relaxed setting—in Rancho Mirage, California, at the Annenberg estate—would help Obama and Xi put relations on a better path. 

Since Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972, the US has talked to China in every conceivable format, formal and informal, bilateral and multilateral, secret and announced. During the previous administration, the number of ongoing bilateral forums reached 50. Today, there are more than 90 of them.

Yet as we continued to talk in all settings, relations became even more strained. And as we held seemingly never-ending discussions, Beijing’s behavior deteriorated.

We need to ask ourselves why. The problem for the administration is that China’s external policies are now being driven by internal trends. For one thing, the Chinese economy has hit an inflection point and is evidently on a long downward slide. This has consequences because, without prosperity, the Communist Party’s only remaining basis of legitimacy is nationalism. Militant nationalism, unfortunately, is now the defining feature of Beijing’s approach to the world.

Moreover, despite what most observers believe, China’s political system is fraying. The divisions caused by the leadership transition to Xi Jinping, which was formally completed in March, have not yet healed. For instance, the failure to bring the divisive Bo Xilai, China’s most charismatic politician, to trial indicates the party’s factions remain at odds. 

In a divided political environment, the People’s Liberation Army looks like it is the most powerful group in Beijing, certainly more influential than Xi’s so-called Princeling faction, which is by no means unified. China now has a leader who, although acceptable to most party bosses, has no identifiable political base of his own. 

In any event, Xi leads a political system where influence is widely spread across party and government units as well as the military. It’s no wonder that, with power so diffuse, Chinese policy lacks coherence. China, in short, is now in disarray.

In this situation, talking to Chinese officials, by itself, will produce little of value. We need to spend less time on dialogue and more on imposing costs for increasingly unacceptable behavior, like harassment of American ships, cyber hacking of our companies, proliferation of weapons to rogues, and aggression against US allies, to name just the most dangerous acts.

Last year, China’s merchandise trade surplus against the US—$315.1 billion—was an astounding 136.3 percent of its overall surplus. That gives the Chinese at least 315.1 billion reasons to act responsibly, but only if they think we have the will to use our power. It’s been a long time since they have respected an American administration. It’s time to change their perception of us. 

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