The Fraying of U.S.-China Relations

The sinologist Jude Blanchette discusses the Biden-Xi summit and whether we are seeing the beginnings of a new cold war.
United States President Joe Biden in a virtual conference with Chinas President Xi Jinping.
“The fact that the expectations of the meeting were simply that they have the meeting shows how far the relationship has deteriorated,” Blanchette says.Source photograph by MANDEL NGAN / AFP / Getty

During the past several years, the U.S.-China relationship has reached its lowest point in decades. This week, after a virtual summit with Xi Jinping that lasted more than three hours, President Biden referred to “commonsense guardrails” that were needed to keep the relationship from spiralling further downward. But the summit did not end with any concrete agreements—or even a joint statement—on the issues affecting the relationship, which run from trade and technological development to human rights in Hong Kong and Xinjiang to the future of Taiwan. The lack of agreement underscored the reality that the problems between the two countries appear largely intractable, despite an urgent need for coöperation on issues such as climate change.

I recently spoke by phone with Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, D.C., about his view of the summit. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether to think about the Chinese-American relationship as zero-sum, Xi Jinping’s refusal to leave China during the past twenty-one months, and why a conflict over Taiwan may be less imminent than many in Washington fear.

What was your biggest takeaway from this virtual meeting?

The fact that the expectations of the meeting were simply that they have the meeting shows how far the relationship has deteriorated over a relatively short period of time. And so, while undoubtedly it’s important that we are now seeing the senior-most-level dialogue, when we think about whether this marks an inflection point as the end of the cold war, the low expectations both sides were setting were actually a sign that the fault lines are quite deep and extensive, and that this is going to be a very long process of finding very limited areas of coöperation amid a deep sea of tensions in key areas of rivalry. So it marks in a more profound way that we are now deeply into—or officially into—an entirely new era of U.S.-China relations.

How would you characterize the era? You just used the phrase “cold war,” even if it doesn’t seem quite like the U.S.-Soviet relationship between 1945 and 1991.

We probably don’t want to spend the whole time talking about Cold War analogies, but I would just say that no historical analogy is perfect, and, like Churchill said of democracy, the Cold War is the worst possible historical analogy except for all the others. It’s not exactly a replay of Soviet-U.S. competition. But it is a multidimensional competition bordering on rivalry between two great powers that is likely to endure for some time, so the broad outlines of “cold war” at least help us begin thinking about some of the things we need to do to manage the relationship. My fear is that, by fighting off Cold War analogies, we are just leaving ourselves in more inchoate and vague territory, and what that leads to is issues like Taiwan continuing to spiral out of control without adopting some Cold War thinking about how to put in crisis-management mechanisms and confidence-building measures. It’s a muscle we haven’t flexed in some time. That’s the limited appeal of the analogy.

What are those measures to prevent things from spiralling out of control? It appeared that the American side seemed to be saying that, even though we have all these issues, this isn’t a zero-sum game. Do you see it that way?

I think actually that one of the outcomes of the meeting—making sure that Xi Jinping is as in person as we are going to get him for the time being—is to now begin to strap the direction of the relationship to his own personage. What had happened before is that he was relatively aloof. And that meant you had this “wolf warrior” army underneath him, and it felt like the relationship was spiralling without him putting his own name and legacy on the line. I think one of the smart moves about getting him to the table is he has a vested interest in managing this because it is strapped to his back.

I think it’s true that it is not zero-sum, but there are areas of both zero-sum and positive-sum. And one of the challenges we have is that we speak of it as “a competition,” but really it is multiple competitions. We are going to see areas, like in green technology, where we are vying against each other, but it could actually yield very positive benefits for both sides, because the pie may not get bigger, but it gets greener and better for everybody. There are areas in technological development where we do and probably should think about this in terms of zero-sum, where advances in some technology come at a stark cost to the other side.

Realist logic dictates that there are going to be key components about regional dominance that are not positive-sum. Either China is the hegemon in East Asia, or the United States is. But that is quite a constricted vision of the relationship between the two countries. There are others where they can be zero-sum, but we have to get them back on track. Trade is a good example of this. We have, since 2016, begun to think about trade more through a national-security lens, and as a matter of exacting leverage on the other side, which gets away from areas of economic integration, which have positive-sum, pie-expanding benefits to both populations. We want to make sure the rivalrous elements of the relationship don’t crowd out the coöperative elements.

What are some of those zero-sum areas which are most concerning?

At the most abstract level, and very starkly, and here I do see echoes of the Cold War, we have some version of ideological competition, but it is a really interesting, unique, updated one. Xi Jinping is now stating that China’s political system is demonstratively superior to Western democracies in its ability to deliver practical governance outcomes, and so the narrative is, “Our system is better than yours, and Western democracy is a path to infighting, polarization, and institutional atrophy.” That is an interesting new development. For a long time, we looked down our nose at the Chinese political system as being sort of a backwater holdout of twentieth-century Communism, and I think Beijing has taken that to heart and spent a concerted amount of time trying to upgrade and revitalize the governance system so much that it can outcompete the West. So, at a high discourse level, the United States and China are both, for their own reasons, in speaking to their own domestic and international audiences, framing this as a competition between, in Xi’s mind, effective vs. ineffective governance, and, in the U.S. mind, authoritarianism vs. democracy. It’s difficult to see how we find a new coexistence with those narratives, because both sides are tying this to basic legitimacy.

More practically speaking, in terms of regional strategic dominance, China is fighting to end U.S. primacy in the region, and the U.S. is fighting to maintain its primacy in the region. And that includes an ability to shape outcomes right off China’s shore. This is an intolerable zero-sum situation, and China is working actively to change the status quo. That explains its island-building activities, and that explains the pace of its actions in the Taiwan Strait. And in some ways I think the United States is living as if it is 1993, as if we hold the same amount of global aggregate power that we did then, and we can still maintain a status quo that held for a good chunk of the post-1945 period, without recognizing a structural shift in power. We haven’t found a way to come to terms with that which is also politically satisfying domestically.

Other areas of zero-sum are in very specific areas of technology. Given that now almost all critical and emerging technologies are also dual use, we are in a really new world where it is hard to separate commercial and strategic technologies. We are going to be able to find areas where they don’t need to be seen as zero-sum, but right now any innovative advance in A.I. or semiconductors is seen by the other side as zero-sum, which is why there is such an intense skirmish over who can control them moving forward.

In terms of Taiwan, what types of markers would or wouldn’t be helpful?

Gosh. It’s a hard one. I don’t have a pithy answer for this. Right now, we are in a hysteria in the United States over what I think is the incorrect analytical judgment that Xi is on the precipice of invading Taiwan. If that is your base analytical judgment, it really makes it hard to be thinking calmly.

Why do you think the judgment is wrong?

Xi has been in power for about ten years, and we have gotten to see some key attributes of how he views the world and how he governs. And one thing I think we should all be able to agree on is that he is not suicidal. If you hold as a basic proposition that the Communist Party wants to stay in power, the next sentence cannot be, “And so Xi plans to invade Taiwan, ninety miles off its shore, potentially involving a nuclear superpower.” The quickest way for Xi to facilitate his exit from power, and to undermine nearly every other objective that he has for the Communist Party, which he has articulated over and over again, is to launch an invasion of uncertain outcome and uncertain duration.

On Monday, the Communist Party put out this big resolution on history. It is the third time it has done so since 1945. There is a really interesting line in there. When Beijing has talked about Taiwan, it has typically said, “Time and momentum are on our side.” In the history resolution, which is now one of the highest-ranking documents in the Party’s hierarchy, it changes the wording to say, “Time and momentum are always on our side.” That is not the sort of messaging you would make internally if you were hot to trot and saw a shrinking window of time on Taiwan. I think the more realistic assessment is that Xi doesn’t really have a good strategy on Taiwan. No doubt he wants to take the island, but right now the assessment of cost is too high. He is locked into a longtime nationalist narrative of not being able to back down from asserting authority over Taiwan, so you see escalating fights in the region and cyberwarfare, but, on the other hand, when he gives speeches, he basically messages not being in a big rush.

It seems like you are saying that neither side has good Taiwan options, and so, however imperfect the status quo, it could really be worse, and we may be here for a long time.

Well, in a way, I think we are in a better position, but that could lead to a fairly bad outcome. The trend lines in terms of public opinion in Taiwan are moving away from any desire for reunification with the mainland, and certainly after events in Hong Kong you can understand why. The United States continues to strengthen its relationship with Taiwan. Support for Taiwan is rising around the world as it comes under China’s bullying. The island’s Democratic Progressive Party continues to marginalize the K.M.T. [The Kuomintang, which ruled Taiwan for more than fifty years, adopted a friendlier posture toward the mainland after losing Taiwan’s second Presidential election, in 2000.] So one can imagine us becoming so successful that Xi feels like he needs to shift his assessment because the window is closing.

What did you make of Xi not attending the Glasgow conference? And to what degree can the countries coöperate on climate change with these other things going on?

On the first one, I think that the question is, What do we read from the fact that Xi hasn’t left the country in two years? What does that say about his own assessment of his priorities? Although President Biden tried to call him out by saying it showed insufficient concern for the issue, I take it more as: this is still a Leninist party, which is fairly conservative in many ways in terms of how it assesses risk, and no senior leader, except for foreign-policy officials, has left the country. So, given the zero tolerance on COVID, and his domestic political agenda, which is uniquely filled with important events between now and next fall, I don’t read too much into the fact that he didn’t show up.

On the issue of climate, I am not sure Beijing thinks about it in the way we do, in terms of seeing rivalry and coöperation as being two really distinct buckets, with one infringing on the other. I think Beijing is more fluid in terms of how it thinks about the issues. Fundamentally, it will work with the United States when it has determined that doing so is in its own interest, not as a gesture of good faith to the United States. So I think we probably gnash our teeth a little more over the conflict-vs.-coöperation dichotomy.

How much similarity do you see between the Biden and Trump approaches to China?

Actually, I think both Beijing and Washington are simultaneously rolling out a strategy on the other country, but also fundamentally we don’t have a master arc for what the relationship is. Ten years ago, it was easy to articulate what this was. It was about trade and economics and globalization. Obviously that plank of the relationship was delegitimized after 2016. And so now, if you were to ask the average person the state of the relationship with China, they might struggle to answer. I think even in Washington we are not entirely clear on what it is going forward.

In China, as well, there is a shift in thinking about the long-term relationship, and whether the United States can be trusted. Certainly the actions and rhetoric near the end of the Trump Administration—like Mike Pompeo’s speech at the Nixon Library, all but calling for fomenting regime change—well, we might know that was not a consensus, but these remarks are all attributable to the United States, and I think that has provoked a profound rethink of the relationship. That shows me that we are going to have a prolonged period of volatility until we can tell a new story about what the bilateral relationship is.

​​What’s your sense of how much the Chinese regime thinks it can continue its human-rights abuses in Xinjiang and elsewhere without much cost, and how much the Biden Administration is willing to make human rights an issue where it will try to draw real lines?

I actually think the two are not separate, but interrelated, because the willingness to draw lines assumes we have power to be able to fundamentally alter the domestic trajectory in China, which is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible. The past several years have shown how deeply entrenched the policies and approach that have led to human-rights abuses in Xinjiang and Tibet and other areas are in China’s view of maintaining political stability and national security. These run very, very deep. China is a confident power with significant resources. This is not the China of 1995 or even 2005. So we have to be circumspect in terms of what we can expect to accomplish in terms of outside pressure.

That being said, in 2017 Beijing denied there were any concentration facilities in Xinjiang. Then they said they were not concentration camps but vocational training. Then they said they shut them all down. That happened because the world began to watch. And, although they continue to this day, it showed that China cares about what the world thinks, and, when eyes are watching, it can have a constraining effect, or at the margin minimize the extent of the more horrific abuses, but not end all of them.

And the Biden Administration?

They clearly want to invest a lot in human rights. That’s not the issue. The heart is there. The question is really, What can you do about it? Are they going to go to war? Are they going to invade? Of course not. I am being a bit flippant, but, once you begin coming in from the absurd extremes, options begin to shrink pretty quickly. But top-line attention from Biden himself, along with concerted attention from the global community, can have an impact, undoubtedly. Pressure from the U.S. government is forcing companies to remove their operations and supply chains from Xinjiang. That is imposing a price on China. The question is: Is it enough of a price that China will walk away from this? No, and that goes back to my initial diagnosis. They think this is an issue of separatism and extremism that threatens the stability of China. It is going to be next to impossible to unseat that diagnosis from Beijing.


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