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by
Kevin Rudd
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April 23 - May 18, 2023
Still, some fissures have recently widened in trade, including Beijing’s reluctance to allow European economies reciprocal access to Chinese markets. The EU became China’s largest trading partner in 2019.
compared with that between Europe and America: total stock of US FDI in Europe was $2.36 trillion in 2019, and European investment in the US was $2.55 trillion, while the total stock of European FDI in China stood at $235 billion and Chinese investment in Europe only $82 billion.
Finally, China’s presence provides Africa with leverage, for the first time, to use against its other development partners. Previously, African states simply had to accept the terms handed to them by the West, meaning that China’s arrival has had significant strategic and economic impact for them. Xi’s Africa strategy is a patient and agile one, and his partners in Africa—by and large—appear to appreciate it.
China’s trade, FDI, and official credit flows to Latin America reflects Beijing’s global emphasis on energy security, raw materials, and infrastructure investment. The vast bulk of China’s imports focuses on just four commodities: oil, iron ore, copper, and soya beans. About 90 percent of Chinese FDI is directed to energy, mining, and particularly infrastructure; as of 2020, some eighty-three major engineering projects—roads, rail, ports, airports, bridges, canals, dredging, and urban transport—were underway across most countries in the region.
“China is not buying from Brazil. China is buying Brazil.”
The key question today is whether the United States is sufficiently conscious of the dimensions of China’s rise and whether it is still possessed of sufficient political resolve and strategic acumen to deal with this formidable challenge to American regional and global power. On this, the jury is still out. But it would be foolish for China
to assume that America will remain distracted and its strategy unfocused or that its relative decline is inevitable and irreversible.
appears that the broader strategic challenge has penetrated the American psyche: that China does represent a strategic challenge to the United States and that Chinese capabilities are not to be underestimated.
The debate was launched by an article titled “The China Reckoning,” published by Kurt Campbell, US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 2009 to 2013 (and, more recently, White House coordinator for the Indo-Pacific in the Biden administration’s National Security Council), and Ely Ratner, deputy national security advisor to then vice president Joe Biden from 2015 to 2017 (and more recently assistant secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs under Biden). In their article, Campbell and Ratner traced a growing disillusionment with America’s previous
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all of whom were united in their collective disillusionment with the results of three decades of
“for decades, US policy was rooted in the belief that support for China’s rise and for its integration into the postwar international order would liberalize China” but that this assumption “turned out to be false.” Instead, the NSS declared China to be a “rival” aiming to “shape a world antithetical to US values and interests” by seeking “to displace
the United States in the Indo-Pacific region, expand the reaches of its state-driven economic model, and reorder the region in its favor.”
“it seems clear that the United States erred in supporting China’s entry into the WTO.”
“the sheer scale of China’s coordinated efforts to develop their economy, to subsidize, to create national champions, to force technology transfer, and to distort markets in China and throughout the world” was an “unprecedented” threat to the United States that justified drastic action.
China completely comfortable with forced technology transfer, intellectual property theft, and commercial cyberespionage. This sense of China being engaged in a long-running strategy of stealing its way to technological parity was reinforced by a brazen series of mass cyberattacks throughout the Obama administration
that succeeded in stealing large quantities of data from US companies and government agencies. These were traced back to China, including to Chinese military intelligence units, such as PLA Unit 61398, which had already been indicted by the US government in 2014 for multiple cyberthefts that “blatantly sought to use cyberespionage to obtain economic advantage.” These concerns were heightened by China’s stated policy of “military-civil fusion” and the legal requirement that private Chinese companies and institutions must automatically share technologies potentially beneficial to China’s
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implementing what FBI director Christopher Wray described as a “whole of society” approach to confronting China.
“The ultimate ambition of China’s rulers isn’t to trade with the United States, it is to raid the United States.”
Rather, the Biden administration demonstrated striking continuity in upholding both the strategic thrust and many of the details of its predecessor’s approach to China. Indeed, while Biden’s team moved quickly to moderate the rhetorical tone of the US-China relationship and, most significantly, launched a diplomatic offensive to reassure US allies and multilateral partners around the world that the US was back and still reliable, Washington’s operational approach to China continued to harden.
“Our relationship with China will be competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be.”
Xi Jinping’s China represents the single largest threat to American global and regional power since the Cold War.
As of the end of 2020, the property sector represented approximately 29 percent of Chinese GDP, 41 percent of all Chinese bank loans, and 78 percent of the wealth invested by urban Chinese. Yet China’s obsessive focus on growth powered by investment into infrastructure and property, along with slow progress on deleveraging, meant that in 2020, there was already enough empty property in China to house more than ninety million people—more than
the entire population of Germany—according to an estimate by the Rhodium Group.
Party leaders recall that no one—either within China or among professional China watchers abroad—predicted the Tiananmen protests of 1989.
Yang’s fiery lecture to Secretary of State Antony Blinken was not designed for an American audience. It was designed for a Chinese domestic audience. More specifically, it was designed to deal
with the nationalist dynamic that has been enlivened in Chinese politics under Xi Jinping.
if the party believes it is under threat at home (as it did in the first half of 2020 due to COVID-19), its default instinct is to demonstrate resolute strength abroad in order to convey a global message that Chinese strategic resolve will not falter despite any internal political pressures.
In many respects, the greatest asset the CCP has is its ability to bluff the rest of the world into believing that China is much bigger, more powerful, and more fiscally solvent than it really is. In doing so, China successfully masked many of its domestic failures, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities from the rest of the world.
For two great powers such as China and the United States—which, at different periods in their histories, have been the most powerful on earth—the fact that they chose not to colonize the world beyond their shores but instead to simply trade with it is no small thing.
There is an enduring view in Washington that all Chinese diplomacy is based on deception.
any protocols Beijing might agree to in order to stabilize strategic or economic tensions with Washington would ultimately prove to be worthless.
Such things are assumed to be designed for cosmetic, or at most tactical, purposes. American hawks point to the CCP’s long history of broken agreements with various domestic and foreign partners, extending back to the party’s assurances to Washington
about power-sharing with the nationalists in 1946,
US national security community believe that the CCP has no compunction about lying or hiding its true intentions in order to deceive its adversaries. In this view, Chinese diplomacy aims only to tie opponents’ hands in order to buy time for Beijing’s military, security, and intelligence machinery to achieve superiority and establish new facts on the ground.
