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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Pomfret
China was furious when the Obama administration encouraged the nations of Southeast Asia to challenge it in the South China Sea. Why should the United States rule the seas so close to China’s shores, many in China asked. Wasn’t America’s much vaunted support for “freedom of navigation” just a smokescreen to allow the US Navy to spy off China’s coast?
In the spring of 2014, Beijing moved an offshore oil exploration rig into an area claimed by Vietnam. The next year, it launched a massive land reclamation scheme to turn seven rocks into islands in seas far closer to Vietnam and the Philippines than to China.
But, at the same time, Washington seemed to be at a loss as to how to roll back China’s land grabs. US Navy officers advocated an aggressive response. In the National Security Council, however, officials fretted about pushing China too far. This disagreement was reflected in US action. In October 2015, the USS Lassen, a guided-missile destroyer, sailed within twelve miles of Subi Reef in the Spratly Islands. But when it did so, Obama administration officals called the Lassen’s mission one of “innocent passage,” which implied that the US government recognized that Subi was Chinese territory.
In Beijing, the People’s Daily took a page out of the 1950s, warning the United States “that China has never been afraid of ‘paper tigers.’”
Xi said on May 21, 2014, it is time “for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia, and uphold the security of Asia.” What he meant, of course, was that it was time for China to replace the United States.
2015, the Chinese legislature passed a National Security Law that appeared aimed at creating a digital world walled off from the rest of humanity.
The Communist Party rang in “National Security Education Day” in April 2016 by plastering Beijing with posters warning female government workers about the dangers of dating foreigners, who could turn out to be spies. The poster, called “Dangerous Love,” chronicled the hapless romance of Little Li, a Chinese civil servant, who falls for David, a red-headed foreign scholar, only to end up giving him secret documents.
President Xi Jinping and the heads of leading American and Chinese tech firms in Seattle, China’s president was clear. American businesses were welcome to come to China to partner with Chinese firms (and hand over their technology). Xi said nothing about US tech firms setting up operations in China by themselves.
On the issue of North Korea’s nuclear program, China seemed to be significantly less interested in cooperating with the US to press Pyongyang to abandon the Bomb. Following North Korea’s fourth nuclear test on January 6, 2016, John Kerry, who had succeeded Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, hurried to Beijing seeking more Chinese help.
The Chinese did approve tough sanctions on the regime in Pyongyang, but there was no requirement to cut off fuel shipments, which come almost entirely from China. Many in Washington feared that Beijing’s goal continued to be the preservation of the North Korean regime and China’s influence on the peninsula.
The Chinese media storm did not subside once Locke and his family arrived in Beijing. His strolls through the capital’s diplomatic quarter, his photogenic family, even his workouts—he could hold a plank for fifty-two minutes—became fodder for the adoring Chinese press, which used the ambassador’s everyday life to mock Communist officialdom. In that sense, Locke’s basic decency and positive attitude fed into a long-standing Chinese belief that the American spirit of self-improvement had something to teach China. That it was a spirit refracted through a Chinese American only made the story more
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In the face of this new reality, Americans again fell into a cycle of despair about China. One leading China scholar after another emerged to declare a crisis in US-China relations. David M. Lampton, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, contended that the relationship had reached an inflection point.
normalization,” he wrote in the spring of 2015. “Has U.S. China Policy Failed?” asked Harry Harding, America’s preeminent scholar of the relationship, in the fall 2015 issue of the Washington Quarterly.
Michael Pillsbury, the former Rand analyst who first advocated selling weapons to the PRC, alleged in his 2015 book The Hundred-Year Marathon that China had harbored a secret plan to surpass America since the first days of its revolution in 1949. With the zeal of the converted, Pillsbury declared that it was time for the United States to get tough with China. The People’s Republic, he declared, “has failed to meet nearly all of our rosy expectations.”
Other China Hands urged America to be more, not less, accommodating. In separate books, China scholars Michael Swaine and Lyle Goldstein argued that the United States should cede the Western Pacific to the Middle Kingdom as part of a grand bargain to improve ties.
However, neither Goldstein nor Swaine could explain why China, after decades of American entreaties, would suddenly agree to set aside its threat to use force.
Henry Kissinger argued that the main issue dividing the United States and China was cultural. It was America’s inability to understand “their history,” Kissinger told National Interest magazine in July 2015, that had brought the two nations to their current crisis.
Kissinger, meanwhile, opted for the mystical Oriental approach. The relationship was difficult, he said, because the inscrutable Chinese do not think like Americans. The Chinese encouraged Kissinger’s view. “It’s not that Americans have misconceptions about China,” argued Vice Premier Wang Qishan in a May 2011 interview with Charlie Rose. “At root, they don’t understand it.… China is an ancient civilization. We are an Oriental culture.” Compared to the Chinese, Wang declared, “Americans are very simple people.”
The problem was that the interests of the Chinese Communist Party were diverging from the interests of the United States—and somehow, many Americans had expected that they never would.
No sooner had Shanghai’s shares plummeted than the People’s Bank of China engaged in a ham-handed attempt to devalue the Chinese currency, the yuan.
The problem, however, was that Trump didn’t replace the old policy with a new, functional paradigm. Gone
Trump’s team saw China’s system as an intolerably predatory one. The administration broke with the previously accepted view of China as a country evolving in a more liberal direction. Instead, it understood China as a determinedly unalterable Leninist state.
At the party’s highest levels, there was no public recognition that China had contributed to the deteriorating relationship with America.
Despite having laid the foundation for a new approach to Beijing, Trump pursued a shambolic China policy. The tariffs he imposed on Chinese products
The COVID-19 pandemic amplified Trump’s worst instincts. Yes, China’s Communists deserved censure for their failure to warn the world of the virus’s danger.
