Biden to G-7: Counter China’s influence

PLYMOUTH, England — President Joe Biden urged European nations and Japan on Saturday to counter China’s growing economic and security influence by offering developing nations hundreds of billions in financing as an alternative to relying on Beijing for new roads, railways, ports and communications networks.

It was the first time the world’s richest nations had discussed organizing a direct alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, President Xi Jinping’s overseas lending and investment push, which has now spread across Africa, Latin America and, haltingly, into Europe itself. But the White House cited no financial commitments, and there is sharp disagreement among the United States and its allies about how to respond to China’s rising power.

Biden has made challenging a rising China and a disruptive Russia the centerpiece of a foreign policy designed to build up democracies around the world as a bulwark against spreading authoritarianism. Beijing has pointed to the poor U.S. response to the pandemic and divisive American politics — particularly the Jan. 6 riot — as signs that democracy is failing.

At the Group of 7 summit meeting, discussions Saturday about how to counter it reflected the debate within the West about whether to regard China as a partner, competitor, adversary or outright security threat.

The leaders largely agree that China is using its investment strategy to bolster its state-owned enterprises and to build a network of commercial ports and, through Huawei, communications systems over which it would exercise significant control. But officials emerging from the meeting said Germany, Italy and the European Union were clearly concerned about risking their huge trade and investment deals with Beijing or accelerating what has increasingly taken on the tones of a new Cold War.

Biden used the meeting to advance his argument that the fundamental struggle in the postpandemic era will be democracies versus autocracies.

The first test may be whether he can persuade the allies to denounce China’s use of forced labor and, in the words of a senior administration official who briefed reporters, “take concrete actions to ensure that global supply chains are free from the use of forced labor.” It is unclear, U.S. officials said, what kind of language about rejecting goods or investments in such projects would be included in the meeting’s final communiqué, which will be issued Sunday.

The divisions on how to regard China help explain why the West has until now failed to muster a coordinated response to Belt and Road. A recent study by the Council on Foreign Relations described Washington’s own reactions as “scattershot,” a mix of modest Congressional adjustments to rules governing the Export-Import Bank to compete with Chinese loans in high technology, and efforts to ban Huawei, China’s telecommunications champion.

The risk for the American strategy is that dealing with a patchwork of separate programs — and a Western insistence on good environmental and human rights practices — may seem less appealing to developing nations than

Beijing’s all-in-one package of financing and new technology.

“Many BRI countries appreciate the speed at which China can move from planning to construction,” said the council report, which was written by a bipartisan group of China experts and former U.S. officials.

Those countries, it added, also appreciate China’s “willingness to build what host countries want rather than telling them what they should do, and the ease of dealing with a single group of builders, financiers and government officials.”

Still, Biden senses an opening, as European nations have begun to understand the risks of dependency on Chinese supply chains and have watched China’s reach extend into their own backyards.

Britain, which once pursued arguably the most China-friendly policy in Europe, has swung firmly behind the American hard line, particularly on Huawei, which the U.S. sees as a security threat.

Germany, for which China has become the No. 1 market for Volkswagens and BMWs, remains committed to engagement and is deeply resistant to a new Cold War.

Italy became the first member of the G-7 to sign up to Belt and Road in 2019. It then had to back away, in part, under pressure from NATO allies who feared that Italian infrastructure would be dependent on Chinese technology.

When China shipped face masks and ventilators to a desperate Italy during its COVID outbreak, an Italian official pointedly told his fellow Europeans that the country would remember who its friends were after the pandemic.

France did not join Belt and Road, though it has welcomed Chinese investment in the country and stopped short of banning Huawei from its wireless network. Relations with China cooled after President Emmanuel Macron criticized Beijing for its lack of transparency on the origins of the coronavirus.

“America would be well served if the European Union got its act together and defined a coherent China strategy,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador to the United States. “Its interests are not well served if there is a German-China strategy, a French-China strategy and a British-China strategy.”