NZ can’t ignore US-China competition

Two of the world’s most important countries are now in open strategic competition. One is our largest trade partner, the other the main security guarantor in the Indo-Pacific region. Managing this contestation presents the ultimate test of New Zealand diplomacy in the coming decades.

Under President Biden, the United States and Xi Jinping’s China are not returning to a pre-Trump administration relationship characterised by careful management of difference and pursuit of shared interests.

Instead, US-China competition is bedding in. The US Congress recently introduced for consideration the Strategic Competition Act 2021. Senator Bob Menendez, the Democratic chairman of the Senate panel, said this act would ‘‘finally meet the China challenge across every dimension of power, political, diplomatic, economic, innovation, military and even cultural’’.

In his April 28 address to a joint session of Congress, Biden announced: ‘‘We’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century.’’

For China, the US is viewed as the benchmark of power and status in the international system. Its preoccupation with ‘‘containment’’, ‘‘encirclement’’, ‘‘Cold War thinking’’, and ‘‘hegemony’’ centres squarely on the US. These concerns have defined much of its foreign affairs and anxiety in the postwar era.

What has changed over the last decade, and what we should all be cognisant of, is that the People’s Republic of China now has the material power and political and economic influence to pursue its interests and assert its world view.

As China’s most senior foreign policy official, Yang Jiechi, remarked in his outburst toward US officials at a meeting in March, in response to Secretary Antony Blinken’s pointed criticisms, ‘‘the Chinese are not going to take this’’.

Of course, the US and China have long been in competition, but this had been moderated by US primacy in Asia and its perception of joint interests, such as trade and business.

As the Obama administration’s top China official Evan S. Medeiros has argued, these stabilisers are diminishing as the drivers of competition intensify.

Long-held positions on territorial disputes like the South China Sea are now backed by China’s growing military and navy and increased political leverage in economic and trade relations.

Chinese interests are bumping up against the US alliance system. Australian scholar Brendan Taylor has shown that flashpoints are evident on the Korean Peninsula, in the Taiwan Strait and on the East and South China Seas.

The US is determined to remain the primary security provider in Asia and China is determined to increase its influence to that befitting a great power.

The economic relationship that was once the great stabiliser has soured as China has moved up the value chain. The US business lobby is no longer the vocal proponent of a stable relationship it once was as many US companies complain their intellectual property is stolen or they are shut out of and discriminated against in the Chinese market.

China’s goal to become a leading technological power and grow its own national champions presents a direct challenge to US technological primacy. Tech decoupling is gaining pace due to concerns around dual use functions and collaborations that could undermine national competitiveness.

US giants like Twitter, Facebook and Google remain shut out of the Chinese market. Chinese tech giants Huawei and ZTE are partly shut out of the US market.

The idea of political convergence, once popular in the US, is now all but dead, with the slow realisation that China’s oneparty political system and the world view that underpins it are with us for the foreseeable future.

China is routinely criticised in US media. Concerns around human rights abuses, intellectual and media freedom and strongman politics are framed as a competition between democracy and authoritarianism.

Chinese state media routinely present the US as in decline and incapable of managing crises or of maintaining social cohesion and development.

Competition for influence in third countries is intensifying.

A mindset of competition now shapes how the US and China interact with each other, and, most significantly for New Zealand, is increasingly influencing how they view the behaviour of other states.

We can protest against the situation, but we certainly cannot ignore it. USChina contestation will likely continue for decades to come and we’re going to need a game plan to endure it.