Do We Have the Luxury to Dither on China?
President Biden wasted his opportunity to confront President Xi on a host of issues. The world will suffer as a result
The leaders of the two major superpowers - currently locked in battle economically, geopolitically and militarily - met in San Francisco yesterday on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders’ Week. In typical diplomatic fashion the language and public events displayed a strange lack of confronting the huge issues facing the two leaders. Here is how the Washington Post described the dissonance:
“After months of criticizing the United States for trying to contain China’s growth, state-controlled Chinese websites were filled Thursday with reports on the ‘positive, comprehensive and constructive’ talks between the leaders of the world’s two largest economies.”
Indeed, it seems that the Biden Administration is doing every thing in its power to appease President Xi. President Biden and Governor “I Can’t Wait to Announce My Candidacy for President” Newsom of California came under immense fire for eerily cleaning up the streets of San Francisco in a week, after consistently claiming there was no way to do this. For China, they just decided to do it. Observers were at one time elated and angry, as it made clear that the open drug market zombie apocalypse that was San Francisco was a policy choice by Newsom and his Democratic Party infrastructure that rules San Francisco and California seemingly with an iron fist.
Interestingly, there is a serious lack of photos or video of the process of moving thousands of homeless people from their nearly permanent residence on the streets. How was this accomplished?
Next, the streets were decked out for the Chinese President, with people paid to wave Chinese flags, causing some to wonder where the US flags had gone, and whether San Francisco was now a Chinese city.
Lest we forget for whom the Biden Administration is rolling out the red carpet for, here’s a brief summary of the issues facing the United States due to China:
According to Alliance for American Manufacturing, 3.7 million manufacturing jobs have been lost to China since 2001
“Mexico and China are the primary sources for fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked directly into the U.S., according to the Drug Enforcement Administration…more than 100,000 deaths a year have been linked to drug overdoses since 2020 and about two-thirds of those are related to fentanyl. The death toll is more than 10 times as many drug deaths as in 1988, at the height of the crack epidemic.” (Emphasis added, Source)
China is currently working to replace the US Dollar as the global currency of record, which would likely have catastrophic effects to US debt, our economy and ability to fund government. They have recently pared their holding of US Treasuries by 40% - a potential move to uncouple themselves from US financial markets.
China has been working to strengthen ties with Russia and Iran for a long time, to create a significant global alliance against the US. Indeed, China has grown in power, prestige and economic cooperation around the globe while the US dithers in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, expending trillions of dollars and losing thousands of American lives in endless regime change wars for no real benefit to the American people.
China - as a rule - steals intellectual property to the tune of trillions of dollars and steals US defense technology secrets, both indiscriminately, hurting our businesses and threatening our national security.
China regularly interferes in internal politics around the globe, and has been linked to donation and blackmail schemes to a number of US politicians, both Republican and Democrat. The original version of this in the US that most have probably forgotten was the Chinese national who arranged $10s of millions to the Clinton campaign in 1996; within five years, China was admitted to the WTO and achieved most favored nation trading status with the US.
China maintains a brutal, state-controlled totalitarian regime that controls all aspects of life in China. One example includes their “Fox Hunt initiative, which “is really a campaign targeting Chinese who live outside China: ‘We’re talking about political rivals, dissidents and critics seeking to expose China’s extensive human rights violations.’ In one example, China threatened someone to either return to China or commit suicide. They and their families are threatened, and those family members back in China have been arrested for leverage.”
The COVID vaccine almost assuredly escaped a lab in China, and China invented the brutal lockdown policy that many US governors followed; China also completely refused to cooperate in the investigation into the origins of the virus, protecting its own as well as likely culpable interests at NIH and Big Pharma.
China maintains ethnic prison states in Tibet and Xinjiang, holding 3 million Tibetans and an estimated 1 million Uyghurs in dystopian prison camps to control and root out dissent.
China recently took over a thriving democracy in Hong Kong in a bloodless coup. Despite promises to the contrary, “Beijing imposed a national security law in 2020 that gave it broad new powers to punish critics and silence dissenters, which has fundamentally altered life for Hong Kongers.”
We could go on, but this list should disabuse any notion that China is a friend to the US, the world, or its own citizens. She is a clear adversary of the United States and of liberal democracy and human rights everywhere.
But you wouldn’t know it if you were watching Xi and Biden meet. Xi began the day by stating: “I am still of the view that major-country competition is not the prevailing trend of current times and cannot solve the problems facing China and the United States or the world at large. Planet Earth is big enough for the two countries to succeed, and one country’s success is an opportunity for the other.”
Biden likewise used weak language to obfuscate the facts: “We have to ensure that competition does not veer into conflict. And we also have to manage it responsibly — that competition. That’s what the United States want and what we intend to do.”
It has been reported elsewhere that President Xi is facing internal struggles at home, and so used this event as an opportunity to quell fears from his party that he does not have the US situation in hand. Biden certainly gave him that cover, ignoring all of the issues listed above save Fentanyl, focusing most of the discussion on climate change.
Meanwhile back at home, Xi’s message is starkly different:
…in meetings with the military, Xi was warning in strikingly stark terms that intensifying competition between a rising China and a long-dominant United States was all but unavoidable, and that the People’s Liberation Army should be prepared for a potential conflict.
In Xi’s telling, China sought to rise peacefully, but Western powers would not accept the idea that a Communist-led China was catching up and could someday overtake them in global primacy. The West would never stop trying to derail China’s ascent and topple its Communist Party, he said in speeches to the military that are largely unreported by the media.
The President wasted a huge opportunity to open the discussion of important, existential issues with China. He instead chose to envelope President Xi in fanfare, deliver the photo ops Xi needed to look strong and have low level discussions that signified absolutely nothing. It was a wasted effort that no one will remember.
Excellent article Justin, thank you!