U.S. policy toward China shifts to confrontation
WASHINGTON — For decades, China had no closer American friend than Dianne Feinstein.
As San Francisco mayor in the 1970s, she forged a sistercity relationship with Shanghai, the first between American and Chinese communities. As U.S. senator, she dined with Chinese leaders at Mao Zedong’s old Beijing residence. And in the 1990s, she championed a trade policy change that opened a floodgate of Western investment into China.
Today the Democratic senator from California sees China as a growing threat, joining a broad array of Trump administration officials, national security strategists and business executives who once favored engagement with Beijing and now advocate a confrontational approach instead.
“I hate to see it all beginning to come apart,” Feinstein said. “That is so hard for me to see ... with all of the hopes that I had between China and this country.”
She has pushed legislation that makes it tougher for Chinese investors to acquire stakes in U.S. firms. And at a recent Senate hearing, she joined other lawmakers in slamming Beijing for cyberattacks and other digital thefts.
Under President Donald Trump’s “America First” policies, the U.S. approach to Xi Jinping’s China has grown more adversarial on multiple geopolitical and economic fronts, much as Washington and Moscow were locked in a power struggle in the Cold War.
But unlike the Soviet Union, China is the world’s secondlargest economy and is on track to overtake the United States. Most of the global economy is dependent on what China produces to an extent unimaginable even a decade ago.
Moreover, China is building a modern military, one that within a decade could be capable of challenging U.S. dominance in the western Pacific. Some scholars and military strategists see an inevitable clash as the two countries jockey to project power and influence.
Experts debate whether Washington is falling into what Harvard political scientist Graham Allison calls the “Thucydides trap,” a reference to Athens and Sparta in ancient Greece, when a rising power caused fear in an established power that escalated toward war.
“Should we simply let ourselves fall into the Thucydides trap?” asked J. Stapleton Roy, a retired U.S. diplomat who was ambassador to China from 1991 to 1995. “Or is it possible that with skillful diplomacy, China could be stronger and more prosperous in 2025 and not a strategic threat to the United States?”
How we got here
Trump’s confrontation with China has encompassed far more than a tit-for-tat tariff war.
The U.S. has stepped up naval patrols close to Chineseclaimed islands in the South China Sea, pursued Chinese nationals abroad for allegedly violating U.S. laws, and warned leading American universities about Chinese spies roaming their campuses.
In a harshly worded speech in October, Vice President Mike Pence accused Beijing of employing a “whole-of-government” strategy to undermine the U.S. economy and political system.
On Dec. 20, after the Justice Department indicted two Chinese nationals for directing a global hacking campaign, FBI Director Christopher Wray went further: “China’s goal, simply put, is to replace the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower — and they’re breaking the law to get there,” he said.
These tensions are not new. After President Nixon visited China in 1972, ending the Communist country’s isolation, Washington saw friendly ties with Beijing as a counterweight to Moscow in the Cold War, which ended in 1991.
Over the next two decades, burgeoning economic links gave both countries a stake in getting along. Despite China’s human rights abuses and other irritants, successive U.S. administrations sought to bring Beijing into international accords on trade, nuclear arms and other concerns, arguing that engagement would lead to economic and political reforms.
Accordingly, Washington granted Beijing permanent normal trade relations in 2000, paving the way for China to join the World Trade Organization a year later. U.S.-China trade surged from $5 billion in 1980 to $116 billion in 2000 to $635 billion last year.
By any measure, China’s economic growth has been phenomenal. In a country once stricken by famines, nearly 800 million Chinese have emerged from poverty in recent decades, according to the World Bank.
“After 1978, we never suffered insufficient food supplies,” said Mao Yushi, a prominent economist in Beijing. Mao, 89, remembers when China in 1979 had just two bridges along 2,000 miles of the Yangtze River across the country, from Tibet to Shanghai. Today it has more than 100, he says.
But U.S. policy experts were wrong: The progress did not produce political liberalization or easing of strict economic controls.
China’s soaring trade surplus instead led to growing U.S. complaints about closed markets, unfair state subsidies, theft of intellectual property and manipulation of currency.
Xi came to power in late 2012 as China struggled with reckless economic growth, a backward military and endemic corruption. His answer: exert an iron grip over the Communist Party and assert its dominance over Chinese life.
He backpedaled on pledges to move toward a free-market economy. Instead, he strengthened the role of state-owned companies and party officials who control them.
“Xi’s idea of governance is to follow Mao Zedong — less liberty, more control,” said economist Mao, whose call for greater freedoms has left him barred from publishing and lecturing.