In September, the House passed a bill that would ban imports produced by Uighur forced laborers in Xinjiang. Companies such as Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola have mounted a lobbying campaign against the bill, which passed the House by an overwhelming margin of four hundred and six to three, and is likely to pass the Senate. If the bill does become law, it will be the latest sign that the relationship between the United States and China is as contentious as it has been in decades. The Chinese Communist Party’s use of forced labor, its authoritarian activity in Hong Kong, and its obfuscation about the coronavirus have raised bipartisan concerns about the future of the relationship between the U.S. and China.
I recently discussed the state of Chinese-American relations with John Pomfret, the author of “The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: American and China, 1776 to the Present” and the former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the ideological competition between the U.S. and China, the complicated history of American companies doing business in the country, and how the Biden Administration’s approach to China might differ from that of the Trump Administration.
There are two things going on right now, and I’m curious whether you think they’re part of the same story. The first is Chinese human-rights abuses in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and the concern they have sparked here. The second is just a growing American-Chinese rivalry, having to do with politics and business and other things.
I think that, fundamentally, we’re at a point where we have an ideological problem with China. This is not simply two large nations competing with each other, like Germany and the United States would be, or America and Japan. This is an ideological challenge. I think that has supercharged what would naturally be competition between us and a rising power in a region of the world where the United States has, for many years, been the preëminent power.
The ideological competition has many parts, and one of the parts has to do with American revulsion at Chinese human-rights abuses, not simply in Xinjiang and Hong Kong but in Han-dominated China, as well. I also think there’s a separate piece, which is how the rising power deals with the resident power, which is just something that’s going to be an issue regardless of the political dimensions of the relationship. I think that the way it combines with the human-rights issue is that this is an ideological competition between two fundamentally different systems, both political and economic.
If it is an ideological competition, isn’t it ironic that this is peaking at a time when the United States elected someone who has the most ideologically in common with an authoritarian regime, has celebrated the leader of China, and has even celebrated the Communist Revolution?
Yeah, definitely. I think that, regardless of whether you look at the U.S.-China relationship or the U.S.-Russian relationship, the election by the United States of someone with soundly antidemocratic instincts is highly ironic, given the fact that the United States now faces an ideational challenge from the P.R.C. and from Russia, as well.
Do you think the Chinese government sees this, similarly, as an ideological challenge?
I think that the Chinese have been fighting the United States as an ideological enemy for far longer than we’ve been fighting them. I believe that China has viewed us as an ideological foe since 1989 and even before that. A significant faction of the Communist Party viewed America as an ideological foe, and America only really began to catch on to this sometime near the end of the Obama Administration. Look at, for example, Document No. 9, which was a document that came out at the tail end of the Hu Jintao era and the beginning of the Xi Jinping Administration, which fingered the United States as an ideological foe; talked about these seven viruses of Western thinking, including constitutionalism and a free press and other values that we supposedly hold dear in this society; and basically said, “This is something that is going to be pushed by hostile foreign forces, and we need to be vigilant about this.”
This was the summation of years of thinking about the challenges that China faced from the United States. In the West, the managers of the relationship basically ignored that, partly because they had this belief that, with free trade and open markets, China would naturally become a more pluralistic society. It didn’t happen that way. I think the United States only came to its senses about this issue at the tail end of the Obama Administration, and then Trump came into power. Clearly, Trump as a character was completely shambolic in how he pursued and prosecuted the relationship.
How do you think the Biden Administration is going to approach China, and how will it differ from the approach of the Trump Administration? It appears that it may be an issue in domestic politics in a way it hasn’t been since the Clinton Administration, maybe since 1989.
Yeah, for sure. I also think that the generation of the folks who managed the China relationship under the old system—which was treating China relatively well in the hope that over time there would be peaceful evolution—that generation is gone. And the Henry Kissingers of the world and others no longer have that much influence at all. I think a new generation of people, in terms of intellectual dominance in the Democratic Party, are on the rise. I think it’s significant that Susan Rice wasn’t given the Secretary of State position, from that perspective.
What do you mean by that?
When she was Obama’s national-security adviser, Susan Rice argued for a broader perspective on the relationship, and not sweating smaller issues with China, in the hope of getting a bigger deal. A lot of issues were put on the back burner because of the Obama Administration’s interest in getting a climate deal with China. The Obama Administration didn’t put that much pressure on China on human-rights issues, or cyber espionage issues, or the South China Sea, because the big goal was what they would frame as an existential one. Because climate change is so much more important, we have to sacrifice these other issues, ignoring the fact that if China is going to make a climate change deal with you, it’s not going to be because you were nice to them over the South China Sea. It’s because it’s in China’s interest to do so.
Within the White House at the time, the attitude was “We can’t let this big deal fall down, so we don’t need to sweat these other things, which are less important,” and that allowed the Chinese to play the Obama Administration relatively well. I think that generation is gone.
Can you say more about how, specifically, you think the Obama Administration was played?
Well, the Obama Administration starts out in 2009. The Dalai Lama’s supposed to be coming to Washington. The Obama Administration basically tells the Chinese government, “Hey, we’re not going to meet him this time, because we want to set a good foundation for a relationship with you guys.” It was a continuation of American behavior toward China, which is sort of upfronting the present in the hope of better future behavior.
They did that on several occasions. An example would be the cyber-espionage deal between Obama and Xi Jinping. Within a year, the Chinese were violating it. The obsession with getting “deliverables” from China blinded them to the reality that the Chinese were willing and happy to break these deals, because they didn’t really respect Obama’s use of power. Because when the Americans would threaten to do things, they actually never did them. Whereas the Trump people, for all their problems, they threatened to do things with China, and they actually did them. Whether they worked or not is a totally different question, right? Tariffs were a disaster, right? This is something that no other American Administration had done in the past, of actually carrying through on the threats that they made to the Chinese.
How does China approach the fact that America is going from an Administration that actively discouraged any action on climate change to an Administration that says climate change is one of its top priorities?
I think from one perspective, the knee-jerk reaction in China would be, “Oh, good. We can play them like we played Obama, right?” I think that Biden and his people are far more wise to that M.O. than the Obama Administration was, simply because they got burned so badly five, six, seven, eight years ago.
If you look at Biden’s interview with the Times, it’s interesting that he is not in any hurry to deal with China. He’s not in any hurry to roll back the tariffs. He’s not in any hurry to take back any of the restrictions, he’s not in any hurry to pull up the Magnitsky Act-like restrictions on Chinese officials for Xinjiang, Hong Kong, et cetera. I think that’s evidence, scant as it may be, of the fact that Biden is not in a hurry to bring the relationship back to normal.
Do you think the Chinese government wanted Trump to get reëlected?
