US has nothing to fear, except the consequences of its own fears

According to media reports on Friday, the US administration is to add 23 more Chinese companies and entities to its blacklist because of alleged human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

Such a move by the Joe Biden administration will only prompt Beijing to “take all necessary means to firmly defend the Chinese enterprises’ lawful rights and interests, and thwart the United States’ attempts to interfere in China’s internal affairs”, as Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said.

It was an order President Biden signed in June banning transactions with those Chinese companies his administration has blacklisted that prompted the S&P Dow Jones Indices and FTSE Russell to decide to remove more Chinese companies from their indices on Wednesday.

It takes no more evidence to show that the Biden administration has not only inherited his predecessor’s China containment strategy lock, stock and barrel, it is also eagerly adding new barrels in an attempt to transform the fear of China into fullblown paranoia.

The interactions between the politics and the market in the US have developed into a vicious circle between misguidance and misjudgment, something Vice-President Wang Qishan pointed out in his speech marking the 50th anniversary of Henry Kissinger’s secret trip to China on Friday. He said that the US should recognize that its biggest challenge is not China, but itself.

The Biden administration keeps professing that it hopes that the US and China can cooperate on climate change and in some other fields, but that sounds like PR speak since it has shown no willingness to stop its China containment move, be they open or underhand, which only serve to aggravate misjudgment of the two sides and beyond. Nobody shakes hands with a person with one hand while fighting that same person with the other.

China has done everything it can to implement the consensus the two leaders have reached in their first and so far the only dialogue on the phone in February. However, on the US part, it is clear many of its words and deeds run counter to what it says.

As Kissinger noted on Friday, the premise that led to his secret visit to China is still valid, even more so today than 50 years ago, and that the two countries should ramp up cooperation and avoid conflict. That many of the disputes and divergences between the two sides seemingly do not have an immediate solution does not justify the US acts to upgrade them into conflict and confrontation.

That’s why, as Vice-President Wang urged, the two countries should seek common ground while shelving their differences, respect each other’s sovereignty, security and development interests, and properly handle differences through consultation to resolve any concerns in a balanced way.

As long as the two countries uphold the vision of a shared future for mankind, they will not face fundamentally antagonistic or irreconcilable contradictions, and will be able to find a path of peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation.