About the author:
S. Mahmud Ali, Associate Fellow, Institute of China Studies, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Distinguished Fellow, Centre for New Inclusive Asia (CNIA)
Introduction:
The dynamics of China-US relations are revealed through policy documents and diplomatic statements. From Trump's trade war to Biden's "de-risking," an intense narrative took shape. History reminds us there will always be road bumps, but despite these struggles, it is important to take a long view of China-US relations and aspire to enlightened statesmanship.
"We are in the midst of a strategic competition to shape the future of the international order… The People's Republic of China harbors the intention and, increasingly, the capacity to reshape the international order in favor of one that tilts the global playing field to its benefit… Autocrats are working overtime to undermine democracy and export a model of governance marked by repression at home and coercion abroad."1
-The US President
"Western countries headed by the United States have contained, encircled and suppressed China in an all-round way, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to China's development… In the face of profound and complex changes in the international and domestic environment, we must remain calm, maintain firm resolve, pursue progress while ensuring stability, demonstrate enterprise in our work, unite as one, and have the courage to carry on our fight."2
-The Chinese President
Policy documents, leadership remarks, official statements, and Congressional testimonies recorded since Donald Trump became US President defined, refined, and articulated Washington's "great-power competition with China" grand-strategic framework.3 China's responses, leavened with occasionally robust rebuttals, disparaged as "wolf-warrior diplomacy,"4 illuminated contradictory beliefs in rights and righteousness. Trump's tariff/trade war "evolved into a so-called cold war."5 Early in his presidency, Biden asserted his determination to prevent China from fulfilling its two-centenary goals "under my watch." Meanwhile, China's envoy in Washington affirmed, "Our goal is not to compete with or replace any other country. This is never in our national strategy."
Then, amidst tensions,7 in November 2023, the two leaders, Xi and Biden, met up in Woodside where both proclaimed success in restoring a measure of "normalcy." They agreed to resume military-to-military exchanges, discontinued after then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the Taiwan region, including at ministerial and operational-command levels, revive economic, commercial, and scientific-technological discussions, and collaborate on reducing climate-changing carbon emissions. China agreed to prevent potential narcotic-precursor exports, while the US pledged to focus its semiconductor-related trade-restrictions on "national security concerns" whose parameters remained undefined.8 The leaders appeared to receive each other with renewed warmth, spearheading agreements, seemingly placing a floor under dynamics which, left unmanaged, threatened to trigger catastrophic escalation. Optimism notwithstanding, symptoms of persistent fundamental differences dividing the two powers soon reappeared. How they got here might illustrate where they are going.
Military Moves Ratchet Up Tensions
The tense military-edge to US-China contention continued an upward trajectory. Post-summit, US forces deployed near China resumed frequent aerial/naval operations in proximate waters and air-spaces which Beijing had historically held. Beijing challenged Washington's claims of "legality," denouncing the US "for violating Chinese sovereignty" and describing it as "the biggest threat" to peace and stability in the South China Sea (SCS). Days later, as the littoral combat ship USS Gabrielle Giffords transited the Ren'ai Reef, and "sailed into Chinese waters without prior notification and violated Chinese law," the PLA Southern Theater Command "organized naval forces, tracked and monitored the US vessel throughout its entire course on high alert."9
The potential for inadvertent clashes between the two forces increased due to further congestion resulting from contingents planning, preparing, and training for worst-case scenarios. This congestion represents conflicting perspectives on rights, responsibilities and jurisdictions.10 Concerns that incidents might spiral rapidly out of control, turning minor confrontations into deepening crises, were rife.11 This tense atmosphere pervaded encounters, and given the long-term attention from various international actors on the SCS, how to deescalate incidents without creating bitterness that would taint final outcomes remained unclear.
Contradictory Countercurrents
China's formative encounter with the West juxtaposed two mutually exclusive paradigms: firstly, a strand linking Anglo-US state-enforced opium infusion, the Opium Wars, consequent "unequal treaties," the sacking of the Summer Palace, Chinese Exclusion Acts, the Taiping Rebellion, persistent violence culminating in the Boxer Rebellion, and extirpation by the Eight-Nation Alliance, driven by tendencies illustrated by Kaiser Wilhelm's "Hun Speech" to German troops departing Bremerhaven to lift the siege of Beijing.12
Donald Trump's 2019 expression of concern that China was "getting ahead of us," former Director of Policy Planning Kiron Skinner's assertion that while the Cold War with Russia had been a "big fight within the Western family," China was "a different civilization, different culture, the first non-Caucasian" rival to US power, and US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo's alarmist insistence that "the threat from China is large and growing; China wants access to our most advanced semiconductors, and we cannot afford to give that access," illuminated subliminal, occasionally overt, ethno-cultural prejudices charging Sino-US perceptual dialectics.13
Still this bitterness was accompanied by remarkably amicable Sino-US official engagements. The 1868 "Burlingame-Seward Treaty" modified the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin's stern provisions. After "treaty-powers" urged Beijing to "adopt a more Western approach to diplomacy and governance," Prince Gong, leader of the Qing Court's Office in Charge of the Affairs of All Nations (Zongli Yamen, or "总理衙门" in Chinese), invited Anson Burlingame (known as Pu Anchen, or "蒲安臣" in Chinese), then US Minister to Beijing, to accompany China's first embassy to Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin. Resigning his diplomatic station to assume the delegation's leadership, Burlingame negotiated with Secretary William Seward an unprecedented treaty premised on Sino-US equality, reciprocity, mutual respect, and shared benefit. Chinese nationals gained the same rights to travel, reside, trade, work, and access educational facilities in the US, as US nationals enjoyed in China; the decision to begin development projects or new construction in China belonged with Beijing, "not foreign powers or their representatives." Formally assuring China of its territorial and administrative integrity, the treaty tacitly inducted China into the Western international community as a peer member.14
Although short-lived, the treaty showed what enlightened statesmanship could achieve. Three decades later, US Secretary of State John Hay initiated the Open Door policy. Designed to extend the US "most-favored nation" benefits, and promote "a free, open market" offering "equal opportunity" for foreign traders in China alongside "respect for China's administrative and territorial integrity," the framework became US policy in early 20th century. Hay urged other "treaty-powers" to abandon their privileges and level the China-trade playing field via uniform tariff-impositions, to be enforced by Chinese (rather than foreign) officials. After the Qing Court endorsed the policy and other relevant countries accessed, Open Door's implementation was interrupted by the Boxer Rebellion, and foreign armies fighting to secure privileges across east China. Ironically, the contradiction between Hay's Open Door policy and Washington's determination "to close the door on Chinese immigration," exposed tensions inherent in US-China relational-dynamics.15
Displacement Anxiety: Systemic Explanations of Sino-US Divergences
International relations theoretical-frameworks, e.g., liberalism, constructivism, and neorealism, partly explain processes generating China-US tensions. Constructs like balance-of-power, power-shift, and power-diffusion can supplement such examinations. Systems theory grants greater clarity.16 Weeks after the Soviet Union's collapse, the hitherto-bipolar "systemic-core" transmuted into a singularity, and the system itself was transformed into a unipolar-structure. US national-security elites drafted analyses precipitating grand-strategic formulations designed indefinitely to extend US systemic-primacy by forcefully preventing the rise of any USSR-like rival-power anywhere, specifically Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, and Latin America.17
China-US relations were fraternal for most of the late 20th century. Politico-military hiccups occurred intermittently, the last when USAF bombers destroyed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, triggering outraged protests. US policymakers truly focused on China in mid-1999. The Office of Net Assessment (ONA), identifying China as an emerging constant competitor, predicted it would, by applying its growing wherewithal, become willing and capable of edging into the systemic-core, thus restoring a bipolar core-and-systemic structure, in contrast to US unipolarity. India was identified as a potential destabilizer amenable to employment as a counter-China ballast.18 This seminal study triggered policy-transformation with swift Congressional action.
The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000 forbade all military engagements with China; the National Defense University was instructed to research PLA activities; the Defense Intelligence Agency was ordered to submit annual reports on China; and a Congressional commission was "formed to analyze security-implications of China-US trade-relations." President Clinton cultivated India and Vietnam. Barack Obama's Asian-pivot, and Trump's tariff-war were waystations on the "competition-trajectory." Washington and Beijing have a choice: will the 1868 China-US treaty be the blueprint for their future relations? That is the question.
1. White House, National Security Strategy, October 12, 2022, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf.
2. "Xi Calls for Guiding Healthy, High-Quality Development of Private Sector," Xinhua, March 7, 2023, https://english.news.cn/20230307/0544c3082cbc4da2aa015ec242a844a2/c.html.
3. Director of National Intelligence, Annual Threat Assessment, February 6, 2023, https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ATA-2023-Unclassified-Report.pdf.
4. Pete Sweeney, "China's Wolf Warriors Start 2023 in Retreat," Reuters, January 10, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/chinas-wolf-warriors-start-2023-retreat-2023-01-10/.
5. Yukon Huang, "The US-China Trade War Has Become a Cold War," Carnegie, September 16, 2021, https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/09/16/u.s.-china-trade-war-has-become-cold-war-pub-85352.
6. Jarrett Renshaw et al., "Biden Says China will not Surpass US as Global Leader on His Watch," Reuters, March 26, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2BH32Z/.
7. John Feng, "Satellite Image Captures US-China Warship Tension Near Taiwan-Held Island," Newsweek, November 7, 2023, https://www.newsweek.com/satellite-images-us-china-taiwan-itu-aba-island-south-china-sea-1841385.
8. "Xi Calls on China, US to Find Right Way to Get Along," Xinhua, November 16, 2023, https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202311/16/content_WS6555438ac6d0868f4e8e143b.html; White House, Read out of President Joe Biden's Meeting with President Xi Jinping of the People's Republic of China, November 14, 2023, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/11/15/readout-of-president-joe-bidens-meeting-with-president-xi-jinping-of-the-peoples-republic-of-china-2/.
9. Qi Wang and Xuanzun Liu, "PLA Slams US Navy Ships for Illegally Intruding Into Water Near Ren'ai Jiao, Violating Chinese Sovereignty, Regional Stability," Global Times, December 4, 2023, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202312/1302997.shtml.
10. Jonathan Landay, "US must be Ready for Simultaneous Wars with China, Russia, Report Says," Reuters, October 13, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/us-must-be-ready-simultaneous-wars-with-china-russia-report-says-2023-10-12/.
11. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, "America's Coercive Diplomacy and Its Harm," Beijing, May 22, 2023.
12. Kevin Waite, "The Bloody History of Anti-Asian Violence in the West," National Geographic, last modified May 10, 2021, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/the-bloody-history-of-anti-asian-violence-in-the-west.
13. Emma Hurt, "President Trump Called Former President Jimmy Carter to Talk About China," NPR, April 15, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/04/15/713495558/president-trump-called-former-president-jimmy-carter-to-talk-about-china; Skinner K, "Remarks at Future Security Forum. DoS/New America," Washington, April 29, 2019; Raimondo to Morgan Brennan, CNBC, Simi Valley, December 4, 2023.
14. OTH, "The Burlingame-Seward Treaty, 1868," DoS, last modified April 8, 2018, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/burlingame-seward-treaty.
15. OTH, "SoS John Hay and the Open Door in China, 1899-1900," DoS, last modified April 8, 2018, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1899-1913/hay-and-china.
16. Eric Hamilton, "Systems Theory," in Oxford Bibliographies in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Norwich University, "Key Theories of International Relations," last modified November 23, 2023, https://online.norwich.edu/key-theories-international-relations.
17. DoD, Defense Planning Guidance, FY 1994-1999, April 16, 1992, https://www.archives.gov/files/declassification/iscap/pdf/2008-003-docs1-12.pdf.
18. Under-Secretary of Defense, Asia 2025, August 4, 1999, https://archive.org/details/UnderSecretaryofDefenseUSDPolicy1999SummerStudyFinalReportASIA2025.
Please note: The above contents only represent the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views or positions of Taihe Institute.
This article is from the December issue of TI Observer (TIO), which examines the prospective development of China-US relations and the implications for the global landscape. If you are interested in knowing more about the December issue, please click here:
http://www.taiheinstitute.org/Content/2023/12-29/1925510553.html
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