Pandemic spreads the chill over US-China relations

Pandemic has brought relations between the two to a modern-day nadir as they try to outmanoeuvre one another to shape the world order

Donald Trump, left, and Xi Jinping at the G20 Summit in Osaka in June. Picture: AFP

Relations between the US and China, strained for years, have deteriorated at a rapid clip in recent months, leaving the two nations with fewer shared interests and a growing list of conflicts.

The Trump administration has moved to involve much of the US government in a campaign that includes investigations, prosecutions and export restrictions. Nearly every cabinet and cabinet-level official either has adopted adversarial positions or jettisoned past co-operative programs with Beijing, an analysis of their policies showed.

Chinese officials are following through on President Xi Jinping’s call last fall to resist anything they perceive as standing in the way of China’s rise. They have stepped up military activities in the contested South China Sea and intimidation of Taiwan, a US ally, and state media has issued extraordinary public denunciations of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The coronavirus pandemic has deepened the rancour, bringing relations between the two to a modern-day nadir. Both governments are forgoing co-operation and trying to outmanoeuvre each other to shape events in the post-pandemic world order.

US President Donald Trump, who has sharply criticised China for its handling of the outbreak, has said he is considering using tariffs and other ways to collect compensation for it from Beijing, though senior officials signalled this week that the administration is holding off on punishing China economically.

Geopolitics strikes back

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian has publicly speculated that the US military unleashed the virus in China — an idea amplified by state media but described as absurd by the Pentagon. A new State Department report concludes that Beijing and its allies are mounting a disinformation campaign against the US over the outbreak.

“It is, essentially, geopolitics strikes back,” said Matt Turpin, who served as China director at the National Security Council earlier in the Trump administration. The US needs to confront China, he said, because “hiding our head in the sand will not make things better.”

Supporters of the US’s harder-edged China policy say it is working, producing a partial trade deal in which Beijing has promised to buy more American goods and services. More broadly, they say, the approach is deterring Beijing by demonstrating strength and resetting relations that previously tilted in China’s favour.

Some officials and many foreign policy experts worry that mutual suspicions are fraying any remaining shared interests.

“The general feeling in China is that the United States does not want China to stand up as a global power,” said Wang Jisi, president of Peking University’s Institute of International and Strategic Studies, in an online forum of US and Chinese experts last month.

About two-thirds of Americans have an unfavourable view of China, according to a Pew Research Centre survey of 1000 Americans conducted in March. That is the most negative assessment since Pew began asking the question in 2005, and a nearly 20 percentage point increase since the Trump administration began. Positive views of Xi also are at new lows.

Members of Trump’s re-election campaign want to make his tough China policy a central issue. They believe it appeals to working-class supporters and ties his presumed Democratic opponent, former US vice-president Joe Biden, to what many in Washington characterise as the Obama administration’s more accommodating posture to Beijing.

Trump has yet to fully endorse the tactic and withheld approval of an attack ad on Biden and China, according to people familiar with the matter. But the pandemic and its toll have hardened his thinking on China, these people said.

In a recent phone call with The Wall Street Journal, Trump said he won in 2016 in part by blasting the US political establishment for being outsmarted by China, rather than by attacking Chinese leaders directly. That approach, he said, helped pressure Beijing to sign the partial trade deal in January.

Trump said he is furious with China over the pandemic and the death it has brought. “It could have been stopped,” he said about the contagion. What he wants Xi to do, he said, “is what we’re doing — looking into the origins of it.”

Last month, US intelligence officials said they are trying to determine whether the coronavirus may have escaped from a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the pandemic began.

Domestic pressures

Even as he has presided over a China policy many see as the toughest in 40 years of relations, Trump has frequently praised Xi and talked of their friendship — a tactic administration officials say is meant to give Chinese leaders an opening to meet US demands for change.

Early this year, several of Trump’s political advisers inside and outside the campaign urged him to take on China more directly, which they argued would have bipartisan appeal. One idea they suggested was a special commission to investigate the origins of the virus and whether Beijing responded sufficiently to control the outbreak.

Trump twice declined suggestions from his team in January to press Xi for more transparency about the virus’s causes and symptoms, in one case saying that the criticism could cause Beijing to be less helpful, said White House officials.

Domestic pressures in both the US and China are likely to aggravate the already strained relations. Supporters of Biden also have produced attack ads focused on China.

Xi, too, has faced criticism at home over the coronavirus, and his administration has sought to project a sense of strength in dealing with the US as he tries to revitalise an economy stalled by the pandemic, manage high unemployment and quash persistent anti-government unrest in Hong Kong.

A decade of tension

US-China relations have been in an uneasy state for more than a decade, with longstanding tensions over trade, allegations of Chinese technology theft and China’s more assertive military and foreign policy. Beijing has sought more aggressively to extend its global influence at the expense of a U.S., seen as weakened by the global financial crisis. After coming to power in late 2012, Xi accelerated the push, using China’s growing military capabilities and commercial might to persuade other nations to heed China’s interests.

Weeks after taking office, Xi gave a closed-door speech to leading Communist Party members in the government, military and other bodies. Using the Soviet Union as an object lesson, he warned that the party must maintain ideological sway over society or risk collapsing and succumbing to the West.

While only a summary of the speech was published at the time, its views were elaborated in later talks and party documents and set China on a course to rival, rather than integrate with, the US-led global order. Xi put tighter controls on speech, instituted new regulations on technology security and stepped up use of antimonopoly and other investigations.

Those moves alienated US business, a constituency which long provided a ballast to bilateral ties. While many US business leaders had long favoured a “grow together” policy with China, that optimism has turned to distrust, largely due to China’s aggressive focus on acquiring U.S. technology and its continued policies to limit foreigners’ access to its market.

When Trump won the election, he initially held back from some of his sharper campaign threats against Beijing to elicit its help in handling North Korea, which was accelerating its nuclear program, testing missiles and threatening war.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington on Thursday. Picture: AP

Around the one-year mark, the Trump administration became less compromising. Trump rejected market-access concessions from Beijing and began levelling tariffs, opening a trade war. A new National Security Strategy placed China, for the first time, beside Russia as disruptive rivals intent on challenging the US-led order.

Adversarial policies

Views on China had hardened in the last years of the Obama administration as Xi consolidated his hold on power, but the White House sought to preserve areas of co-operation, chiefly on climate change and the global economy. By naming China as a threat, the Trump strategy marked a break with previous administrations.

“We had undervalued the degree to which ideology drives the Chinese Communist Party,” said H.R. McMaster, the retired US army general who presided over the strategy while serving as national security adviser early in the Trump administration. “As a result, we had indulged in this conceit over the years that we could change China by welcoming China into the international order. It was pretty obvious by 2017 that that didn’t work.”

A review of the China policies of the Trump administration’s 23 cabinet and cabinet-level officials reveals that nearly all of them have adopted adversarial policies toward China or curtailed co-operation with the country.

The Justice Department launched what it called a “China Initiative,” which encouraged prosecutors to bring China-related espionage, theft and hacking cases.

The US Education Department in 2019 started investigating foreign funding at American universities. That prodded schools to abide by a legal requirement that many had ignored and report $US6.5bn ($10.1bn) in previously undisclosed foreign funding.

Independent agencies such as the US Federal Communications Commission also took action. The FCC has begun substantially curtailing Chinese access to U.S. telecommunications infrastructure. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has posted to Twitter articles about China actions he dislikes, tagging each with a sarcastic “You don’t say.”

He said in an interview that one of his Twitter followers is the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Zhao, but “I don’t follow him back because I don’t want him sliding into my direct messages”.

At the State Department, Pompeo has called for Americans to “engage China as it is, not as we wish it were”.

“Today, we’re finally realising the degree to which the Chinese Communist Party is truly hostile to the United States and our values,” Pompeo said in a policy speech on China last October.

The State Department this year instructed all US embassies around the world to form working groups to monitor China’s expanding influence and report back to help formulate counterstrategies, according to a person familiar with the effort.

The department appointed a special envoy early this year to counter what a spokeswoman called “the malign influences” of China and others at the UN and other international organisations. A first task for the envoy, along with other State and Commerce Department officials, was to thwart a China-backed candidate from becoming the head of the UN body that promotes protection of intellectual property.

China has responded in line with Xi’s speech to up-and-coming Communist Party officials at its elite training academy last September. He called on the officials to “dare to struggle, and be good at fighting”.

During the coronavirus pandemic, Beijing has sent shipments of protective gear and other medical equipment to countries it is courting and mobilised its diplomatic corps to pressure recipients to make sure China receives praise. When the Trump administration accused the World Health Organisation of covering up for China and froze funding that runs to hundreds of millions of dollars annually, Beijing stepped in with $US30m more.

At home, party propaganda targeted Pompeo in unusually searing attacks directed at a senior US political figure. In evening news bulletins, China Central Television called him a “public enemy of mankind” and “evil,” saying he smeared China over the coronavirus.

On Wednesday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman challenged Pompeo to present evidence to support his recent claim that the new coronavirus came from a Chinese laboratory.

The Wall Street Journal