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Why the US-China relationship is more stable than you might think
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take to kick off your week. US Secretary of State Tony Blinken in the Middle East right now. But he just came from China, Beijing and Shanghai, and the US-China relationship is what I'm thinking about. Want to give you a state of play.
It continues to be better managed and more stable than we've seen in a long time. Now, not clear that would necessarily be the case, given the number of issues and places where we have friction between these two countries. Just over the course of the last couple weeks, you've got President Biden, putting new tariffs on Chinese steel, opening a new investigation into Chinese shipbuilding. You've got this anti TikTok policy that's coming down from US Congress. You've got $2 billion in additional military aid for Taiwan from the United States. You've also got lots of criticism from the Americans on ongoing Chinese support, dual use technologies for the Russians, allowing them to better fight the war in Ukraine.
Given all of that, is the relationship starting to become much more confrontational? And the answer is not really. It's true that the Chinese foreign minister said that the Americans need to choose between having a relationship of containment and a relationship of partnership, and it's certainly true that the Americans would rather have it both ways. They want to have partnership in areas where it suits the Americans, and containment in areas where it suits the Americans. The Americans getting away with more than that than other countries can because the US is the most powerful country in the world and ultimately the Chinese need Americans more than Americans need China. Still, there's a lot of interdependence, and there is an ability to push back. How much is China actually doing that? And the answer is there's been very little direct Chinese tit for tat, despite all of the policies I just mentioned. It is true that overnight, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said that there would be resolute and forceful measures if the supplemental support for Taiwan, which is a red line for the Chinese, is signed and Taiwanese assistance from the US moves ahead, and I suspect that means we're going to see some more sanctions from China against US defense contractors.
That is largely symbolic. It is a tit for tat. But on all the other policies I've mentioned that the Americans have just brought against China, we've seen Chinese focus on making their country and their economy more resilient against American efforts to contain, but not hitting the Americans back, not calibrated, moves of sanctions or reciprocal investigations. In fact, the Chinese have been pretty stable.
Also. We saw that Xi Jinping still met with Secretary of State Blinken directly, a meeting that would be very easy for the Chinese government to take down, and historically certainly wouldn't have been present if there had been a lot of tension in the relationship. They chose not to do that. And in fact, Blinken went to a record store, you know, he plays guitar and sings, and he's into music. And the coverage from the Chinese state media of that trip was very humanizing, was very friendly, frankly, better coverage of a US secretary of state than I've seen at any point since Xi Jinping has been in power. That's something it's very easy for the Chinese government to put their thumb on the scale if they want to show that they're unhappy with where the US relationship is. I think about Obama and the town hall, that he wanted to put together and the Chinese unwilling to give him the kind of coverage that the Americans at the time had wanted. You know, this is a lesser official from the US and is still getting, frankly, tremendous treatment from the Chinese government. I think that matters a lot.
Having said all of that, this is a relationship that is becoming more challenging to manage. And that's true because in the United States, whether you're Democrat or Republican, one of the very few things you can agree on in foreign policy is that there is a benefit in going after China. So the policy from the US is not just about Biden making decisions himself, but it's also about members of Congress. It's about governors. It's about the media. All of whom are taking their own shots. And they're not coordinated. Where from China, if Xi Jinping wants it, everyone basically rose in the same direction. Now, there are lots of American corporations and banks that are sending their CEOs, making trips with China right now. And there's much more people to people engagement between the two countries, something that Chinese officials are strongly focused on.
There's a lot more communication and cooperation on things like climate, as well as in response to America's fentanyl crisis, where the Chinese are shutting down the labs, the companies that have been exporting the precursor chemicals. Those things matter. They are engaged. There's also a lot of willingness of the United States, at the highest level, to provide more information to China, just on what the Americans are seeing happening around a confrontation in the Middle East that China would like to see a cease-fire for, so would the Americans at this point. And also, the Chinese don't have a lot of high level diplomats and a lot of ability to collect information that the Americans do. And when high level Americans are talking to their Chinese counterparts about the Middle East, the Chinese are very much in taking notes mode and appreciating that they're getting that information from the US.
So overall, I continue to see a lot of high level engagement that is very constructive. But coming against a relationship that has virtually no trust and where the baseline of conflict is going to pop up in a lot of different ways and a lot of different places around the world. Over time it's going to be harder to maintain that stable floor on US-China relations. But for now, I think we're likely to continue to see it, at least until elections in November.
That's it for me. I'll talk to you all real soon.
Conservative MP Michael Chong speaks during a news conference in Ottawa.
China's threats as Mr Chong goes to Washington
National security threats have a way of uniting politicians from across the aisle and that was on full display this week when the US Congress, investigating Chinese foreign interference, asked a Canadian politician named Michael Chong to testify. Not your average Tuesday on Capitol Hill, but Chong has a compelling story to tell.
In 2021, after he tabled a motion in the Canadian Parliament to declare the Chinese repression of the Uyghur population a genocide, he and his extended family in Hong Kong were actively targeted by agents of the People’s Republic of China. China has denied the allegation, but there is plenty of evidence to support Chong’s claims about Chinese interference. With a US election in just over a year and Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns ratcheting up, US politicians are looking to learn from his experience to develop their own countermeasures.
Chong, now the Conservative Party’s chief foreign affairs critic, was elected in 2004, which is when I first met him as I covered his campaign. Born in Canada, Chong has relatives in Hong Kong, who he now fears will experience ongoing reprisals by Beijing.
I spoke to Chong after he testified in Washington, where US politicians wanted to find out why he thinks the US and Canada need to work more closely to combat Chinese threats to the national security of both countries. During the hearing, they praised his “courage” for standing up to China.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Solomon: Thanks for speaking to me Michael. Can you describe what you told US lawmakers when you testified before the Congressional committee that is looking into foreign interference in democracies?
Chong: I delivered two clear messages to US senators and lawmakers. The PRC's interference is also affecting many Canadians coast to coast whose stories remain untold and they suffer in silence. The message I delivered is that we need to deliver a suite of measures, a range of tools, to help governments combat this menace, including closer cooperation among allied democracies.
Can you remind people what happened to you?
Essentially the PRC initially sanctioned me for a decision the government of Canada took to sanction individuals in Xinjiang province, but what happened next crossed the line. Which is that they had a diplomat in the PRC consulate in Toronto named Zhao Wei actively gather information about me and my family back in Hong Kong to further target me using clandestine and coercive measures, that was the first line that was crossed. [Editor's note: Canada eventually expelled the Chinese diplomat.]
The second line crossed was this past May when they actively spread disinformation on Canadian social media platforms about me. Global Affairs Canada concluded that this disinformation emanated from PRC state accounts. So those are just two examples of the kinds of threats that many Canadians are facing every day.
Is China alone in doing this or are other countries also engaging in similar behavior?
That is a good question. China is not alone in doing this but according to our intelligence services, China is by far the number one threat actor based on the intelligence gathered. We believe that over 90% of the foreign interference threat activity in Canada come from the PRC. So, it is by far the main foreign threat operating inside Canada and why the focus has been on countering this threat.
What kind of measures should be deployed to stop this?
A foreign agent registry is one measure that needs to be implemented. The Canadian government has committed to introducing one in the future. Another measure is using sunlight and transparency to publicly tell citizens about intelligence gathering and foreign interference threat activity so citizens can insulate themselves from these kinds of threats.
Another example is exchanging best practices on evidentiary standards and translating intelligence into evidence. Other measures include resources to law enforcement to prosecute individuals from breaking the law and threatening Canadians. So, there are a range of measures but there is no one magic bullet that is going to fix this problem.
China denies all this. They say they did not engage in any interference and certainly not against you. Are these lies?
That is false. Some of these activities have been proven in court and some of this has been submitted as evidence in court. It has risen to evidentiary standards. For example, last October, the US Justice Department revealed in an unsealed indictment that a Canadian in Vancouver had been coerced by PRC agents to go back to the PRC. We have plenty of evidence that PRC has engaged in this activity on a broad level. The high-profile unlawful detentions of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor are just some of the literally hundreds of examples of PRC oppression in Canada and abroad.
Why did the US Congress want to hear from you and what was the takeaway?
They are interested in understanding what kind of PRC repression is taking place in other allied democracies and I think they are interested in what solutions are being used abroad to counter these threats. We talked at length about threats on university campuses. The PRC has been targeting universities across democracies and has used tactics such as coaching Chinese international students into threatening and coercing other students who are advocating for Tibet, human rights in Hong Kong or for the Uyghurs.
We also talked about how to insulate universities from intellectual property theft that is taking place at universities in sensitive areas of research.
How does this impact US/Canada relations with China?
I think that Canada-PRC relations are broad and multi-faceted. We have some CAD$100 billion in two-way trade with China and the US has a commensurate amount of two-way trade [Editor's note: it is closer to $700 billion], so obliviously we are going to have to engage with the PRC, but we should do so by being clear with PRC officials of what is acceptable and what is not, and be clear that we will stand up for our interests and in defense of the security of our citizens when they interfere with our democracy.
Do you now feel you or your family in Hong Kong are under threat from the PRC?
I feel emboldened. The targeting of me has convinced me that what I and other outspoken critics are doing is effective. I don’t think they would be targeting us in this way if it wasn’t effective. I feel emboldened to speak up, to give voice to the voiceless and defend Canadian sovereignty.
What is at stake here is what CSIS, our national security intelligence service has told us, is our very democracy. CSIS has said this is a serious national security threat, they said explicitly it threatens our economy, long term prosperity, social cohesion, our Parliament and elections. That is not a small thing. So, I think it is important to continue to educate Canadians about this threat and to stand up and make it clear to the PRC that we will not be cowed and that we will stand with other allied democracies and defend ourselves.
You were critical of the Canadian government's actions on this file for a long time and thought they were asleep at the switch. Has the Canadian and US posture on this changed? And with both a US election coming up and possibly a Canadian one soon, is this situation now more urgent?
I think the Canadian government has been slowly coming to react to this threat. They recently announced an independent public inquiry, something that we long called for. This past spring, they announced that they would introduce a foreign agents registry at some point, something we had called for over three years.
But people will understand that I am a little skeptical. Because at each and every step along the way they have only done something in reaction to the public outcry and pressure that we have brought to bear, so I will wait to see if they continue to step up to meet this threat.
I think the next election is particularly important. In the last election there was evidence that CCP accounts were spreading disinformation about a [Conservative candidate] colleague of mine who was running for reelection. So, what happens in the next election -- what measures the government puts in place to inform Canadians about intelligence that is pointing to PRC disinformation operations -- is something I will be looking for.
Interview conducted by Evan Solomon.
U.S. President Joe Biden holds a press conference in Hanoi, Vietnam.
What's Biden doing in Vietnam?
US President Biden flew to Vietnamon Sunday for a series of meetings with Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong. Speaking in Hanoi, Biden said the United States had “strengthened our ties with another critical Indo-Pacific partner,” after Vietnam officially elevated its relationship with Washington to the top level of the country’s three-tier hierarchy for bilateral relations, one also bestowed on both China and Russia.
Both countries loom large during Biden’s visit. While the US President denied the trip is about containing China, there is no doubt that increased US engagement aims to temper Beijing’s influence with Hanoi. And it’s not a one-way street: American overtures are welcome for economic and security reasons. Consider that American imports from Vietnam have nearly doubled since 2019, a bright spot while Vietnam’s overall exports fell for a sixth straight month in August due to softening global demand and China’s worsening economic outlook. Making matters worse for Hanoi, Beijing continues to boost its military presence in the South China Sea.
Crucially, Biden is scheduled to announce steps to help Vietnam diversify away from its reliance on Russian weapons. The timing is no accident: according to an internal Vietnamese document, Hanoi is planning to purchase arms from Russia to upgrade its military, through transfers at a joint Vietnamese and Russian oil venture in Siberia.
Still, US officials have warned that without significant overhauls of its infrastructure, there are limits on how much Vietnam’s economy can grow and rival China as a chief exporter of goods to the US and Europe.
Flags of China and U.S. are displayed on a printed circuit board with semiconductor chips.
US Treasury chief goes to China
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is kicking off a four-day visit to China on Thursday. The last time such a visit took place was four years ago, at the height of the Trump’s US-China trade war.
To be sure, Yellen’s trip is more about messaging than substance, with both sides already trying to mitigate expectations of a significant breakthrough as bilateral relations remain extremely tense.
Still, there will be many thorny issues on the agenda, in particular deepening tit-for-tat trade and tech controls. While taking a less publicly combative approach toward China than his predecessor, President Joe Biden has kept in place almost all of the Trump-era trade tariffs on Chinese products, and has in fact doubled down on efforts to quash Beijing’s influence in the burgeoning tech space.
Crucially, Biden has recruited allies to join Washington in blocking semiconductor exports to China, as well as other materials crucial to the development of artificial intelligence. In fact, the Dutch government just announced new export restrictions on machinery, prompting China to hit back by placing fresh export bans on two crucial metals needed to make chips – and warning of more to come.
Yellen will hope to lower temperatures amid growing fears that China could extend these restrictions to other commodities – like rare earth minerals, a field Beijing dominates – that are crucial to manufacturing electric vehicles and other essential tech. But China isn’t going to unilaterally soften its approach, and it is hard to imagine the US changing its tune in the months ahead, particularly amid an election cycle where tough-on-China policies resonate across the political aisle.
Picture of the Tik Tok symbol over the US Capitol Building.
TikTok "boom"! Could the US ban the app?
As a person over 40, the first thing I did when I heard about a new bipartisan US bill that could lead to a ban of TikTok was: call my niece Valeria in Miami.
She’s a high school sophomore who spends a lot of time on TikTok.
“People are hypnotized by it,” she told me, estimating she spends up to two hours a day on the app, even when she deliberately erases it from her phone during school hours. And during the dog days of summer, she says, some of her friends will tap in for more than eight hours daily.
On this particular day, the two top vids in her feed were: a physics teacher driving a homemade rocket-powered scooter through his classroom to the soundtrack of rapper Ace Hood‘s hit record “I woke up in a Bugatti,” and a mesmerizing vid of a woman applying fine lines of wax to a Pysanka egg.
This is the sort of algorithmic catnip that has won TikTok more than 100 million users in the US alone.
But the new bill moving through Congress could end all of that. The RESTRICT Act would expand the president’s power to ban apps or hardware made by companies based in countries that Washington considers “adversaries.” While the bill doesn’t mention any companies by name, Chinese-owned TikTok is widely understood to be its fattest target.
US lawmakers have already banned TikTok on government devices – but the new bill would permit the president to scrap the app from everyone else’s phones too.
Why do people want to ban TikTok? Supporters of a ban say the app, which records loads of personal data about its users, is a national security risk. After all, what’s to stop the Chinese government from demanding TikTok hand over all that data on ordinary Americans’ locations, obsessions, and contacts? (Answer: nothing – it’s a one-party state.)
What’s more, the platform’s vast reach has raised concerns that Beijing – or its friends – could use TikTok for propaganda or influence operations meant to mess with American politics.
My niece, for her part, says that while the political and privacy issues don’t come up much among her friends, she does worry about this problem of disinformation. “TikTok has a false sense of credibility. If you wanted to get a large number of people to believe something that was not true,” she says, “TikTok could be useful for that.”
TikTok says it recognizes the concerns, but points out that it has already negotiated solutions to these issues with the US. Those reportedly include creating a special US-based oversight board for its content and transferring US users’ data to servers run by American companies.
Opponents of a ban have strong arguments too.
For one thing, a big legal fight could await.
“There are important First Amendment concerns,” says Anupam Chander, a scholar of international tech regulation at Georgetown Law School. “TikTok is an enormous speech platform, one that millions of Americans depend on on a daily basis.”
Supporters of a ban disagree, arguing that a ban on the company isn’t a ban on speech itself. But the issue would almost certainly wind up before the courts before long.
At the same time, banning TikTok could provoke a backlash at home. While polls show a majority of Americans support a ban, Democrats are far less keen than Republicans, and younger voters – TikTok’s primary users – are evenly split over the issue.
There’s a global angle too. Banning TikTok or forcing it to house its data in the US could set a precedent that comes back to hurt global American firms, according to Caitlin Chin, a tech regulation expert at CSIS.
“The U.S. economy depends on cross-border data flows,” she says. “If the United States starts banning companies based on their corporate ownership or their country of origin, this could encourage other countries to do the same.”
But perhaps the biggest issue, says Chin, is that banning TikTok wouldn’t really address the specific concerns that TikTok’s critics have raised.
Thousands of American companies already sell data to brokers who can pass it on to hostile governments, she points out. And as we’ve seen, US-based social media platforms are hardly immune to spreading disinformation themselves. For Chin, the problem is more basic.
“The US has very outdated and fragmented regulations when it comes to both data privacy and content moderation. Banning TikTok is not actually going to solve our data privacy or surveillance or propaganda problems.”
As for Valeria and her friends, banning TikTok might not be the worst thing, she says.
Lessons from “balloon-gate”
By now you’ve heard and read plenty about the Chinese spy balloon that floated across the continental United States last week before it was shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4, so I’ll spare you the details. Absurd as it was, we’re not going to remember the incident in a couple of months. Heck, you probably don’t care already.
And that’s fair enough: The fact is the hullaballoo(n) was no big deal, for several reasons.
First, the balloon posed no threat to US national security. Washington and Beijing spy on each other all the time; China didn’t need a clunky unmanned orb to collect intelligence (they have satellites and, um, your cell phone for that). Second, this wasn’t the first time something like this has happened; the Pentagon confirmed at least four Chinese balloon incursions in the recent past, including three during the Trump administration. Third, the US had every right to shoot it down and little choice to do anything but once the incident went public. And fourth, President Joe Biden was probably right to wait to give the order until he did.
The outrage from all sides — the White House, Republicans, Beijing — is nothing but hot air. Nonetheless, the incident is interesting because of what it tells us about the world we live in.
So, what lessons can we draw from balloon-gate?
Xi makes mistakes — sometimes big and costly ones. There’s been lots of speculation about why China sent a slow-moving, 200-foot-tall balloon to hover over American nuclear silos (unlike most years, when it deploys Snoopy along 5th Ave), but I see only one reasonable explanation: miscalculation.
It was obviously no accident: The aircraft was reportedly “maneuverable,” but even if it wasn’t and Beijing’s claim that it was an “errant weather balloon” was true, the Chinese would have notified the US as soon as it went wayward. And it’s hard to imagine it was intentional, since Xi Jinping had nothing to gain from provoking the US now — not while China is in the middle of a charm offensive to court foreign investment and revive economic growth after exiting zero-COVID.
Maybe he assumed he could get away with it like he had in the past, or maybe he was badly advised about the risk of retaliation. Either way, Xi didn’t want this outcome. On top of his track record of consequential missteps, this should make everyone worry about what other serious blunders Xi could make in the future.
US-China relations are a minefield. Biden and Xi have both expressed a desire to build a “floor” under the relationship, but that will prove easier said than done amid structurally intensifying strategic competition and a complete absence of trust.
Balloon-gate is only the latest in a series of mutual escalations in recent weeks, including US sanctions on a Chinese company doing business with Russia’s paramilitary Wagner Group, a likely US ban of all trade with Chinese tech giant Huawei, and new proposed Chinese export controls on key high-tech industries.
And more clashes are sure to come soon as China grows closer to Russia (possibly in defiance of US sanctions), House Speaker Kevin McCarthy travels to Taiwan, and Washington tightens the screws on China’s tech sector. The fact that a literal balloon caused the US to indefinitely postpone a much-needed meeting with Xi is a sign of how little it could take for the relationship to … blow up.
US domestic politics complicate efforts to ease tensions. It’s very hard to imagine Biden was planning to shoot the balloon down if Secretary of State Antony Blinken was heading to China to meet with Xi. And Biden was very much still planning on sending Blinken to Beijing after he found out about the balloon. Why? Because it posed no real threat to anyone, and the trip was still in America’s interest. The minute photos of the balloon went public courtesy of the Billings Gazette, though, Biden had no choice but to back off.
That’s not flip-flopping — that’s politics. America’s political polarization and bipartisan support for aggressive China policy mean any US president would’ve been under intense pressure to act tough, even if doing so undermined US strategic interests and made conflict more likely. We saw this last year with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leaked trip to Taiwan, and we’ll see it again in the spring when Speaker McCarthy travels to Taipei. This perverse political reality limits the room to stabilize ties and incentivizes actions that risk confrontation.
All of this bodes poorly for Biden and Xi’s attempted détente. Ironically, Blinken’s trip to Beijing was meant to put guardrails in place to prevent these sorts of crises from spiraling out of control. But as this episode makes clear, Washington and Beijing will struggle mightily to prevent a drift toward escalation.
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GOP-led US House will get tougher on China — but not as much as you'd think
Republicans succeeded in unseating Democratic leadership of the House in this US midterm election and will take control of the lower chamber early next year. Still, one foreign policy issue that seems to enjoy unusual bipartisan consensus in Washington is China. While there’s some truth to that assessment, there are differences in the China-related issues that each party tends to emphasize. There’s also quite a lot of partisan politics undergirding deliberation and debate over China.
Both parties are vying to position themselves as the better choice to lead the United States in rising to the China challenge. The Republican primary for the 2024 presidential race will get underway soon, and GOP hopefuls will be competing with each other, seeking to convey to voters their credentials as critics of the Chinese Communist Party. More than 80% of Americans now hold unfavorable views of China, but Republican voters express comparatively greater concern, and that is reflected in GOP candidates’ relatively outspoken support for hawkish China policy.
For both of these reasons, even though the Biden administration continues to take a tough line on China, Eurasia Group analyst Anna Ashton fully expects a Republican-controlled US Congress to charge that the White House is not being tough enough. We asked her how this might affect American policy toward Beijing.
What is known about the China views of the expected new committee heads?
Several key House committees are likely to be run by Republicans who have already distinguished themselves as China hawks. Mike McCaul (R-TX), the presumptive chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, has pushed for greater US military support for Taiwan and sought stronger Congressional oversight of China export controls. Mike Rogers (R-AL), the favorite to head up the Armed Services Committee, has urged greater preparation for a Chinese attack on Taiwan and called for withdrawing US supply chains from China. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), the likely new boss of the Energy and Commerce Committee, has highlighted the risk that green energy solutions will perpetuate US reliance on China. Finally, the likely next chairs of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (Sam Graves, MO) and the Natural Resources Committee (Bruce Westerman, AR) have both joined McMorris Rodgers in drawing attention to this problem, urging that the US avoid “relying on authoritarian regimes for energy.”
Will the small Republican majority result in less pressure on China than if the expected red wave would have materialized?
Although there are noteworthy divides between House Republicans and Democrats on how to approach China issues, there is significantly more common ground between House Republicans and Senate Democrats. A small majority in the House does not necessarily translate to poor odds for Republicans’ China proposals in Congress overall. Republicans’ very slight lead is looking like it could prove to be powerful leverage for far-right Republicans who want more of a say in House priorities, but Freedom Caucus members are not lead voices on China issues. To the extent they seek to influence the China agenda, they are likely to support attention to issues like the repression of religious freedom and the origins of the COVID virus. But it is also fair to say that most of these members will be focused on other issues.
What new or existing legislation is the Republican House expected to advance?
In 2020, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy established a GOP China Task Force, which later issued a report with more than 300 policy recommendations for Congress and the administration on how to deal with Beijing. The six categories have been common threads in hundreds of proposed bills during the last two congresses and will likely continue to be strong themes: ideological competition, supply chain security, national security, technology, economics and energy, and competitiveness.
China-related issues that have drawn Republican interest suggest that the 118th Congress might push more aggressively to revise America’s longstanding Taiwan policy. The GOP will move so send more high-profile Congressional delegations to Taiwan, intensify pressure to curb licenses for tech exports to China, and further limit Chinese companies’ ability to access US capital.
The GOP also wants to establish a Select Committee on China, which will hold hearings, conduct investigations, and coordinate messaging. Expect hearings focused on Chinese influence over US companies and Chinese influence operations in the United States.
Given the fairly strong anti-China stances of both parties, what are the prospects for cooperation with the Democrat-controlled Senate and White House?
The Senate, under narrow Democratic control, has demonstrated strong cooperation on China legislation, passing the sprawling US-China Innovation and Competition Act, or USICA, in June 2021 with 19 Republican yes votes. The CHIPS and Science Act that ultimately became law is far less comprehensive than USICA — in part because bipartisan cooperation on the wider array of issues proved impossible. The House will likely continue to struggle for consensus on many China issues, though both parties might find some common ground on proposals that call out China’s human rights record, improve US competitiveness at home, or better protect US security interests.
How is China expected to react and what are the risks of crossing Chinese “red lines”?
In general, when Beijing opts for an official response to punitive US actions, it opts for equal and reciprocal measures. But moves that are not officially retaliatory are more common.
The most significant known red line for China is official US recognition of the sovereignty and independence of Taiwan, but that’s highly unlikely to happen under the Biden administration. American efforts to strengthen ties with Taiwan — especially measures that grant more trappings of sovereignty to Taiwan — will provoke strong responses from China. Congressional visits and legislation that appear to grant Taiwan more of the trappings of sovereignty could result in additional live-fire military exercises, sanctions on US officials, and reduced cooperation and communication on issues of mutual interest.
Provocations centered on Taiwan, human rights, democracy, or other issues that Beijing views as matters of sovereignty could spur China to enforce some of its provisions aimed at countering US long-arm jurisdiction — the ability of American courts to exercise jurisdiction over foreign defendants from China. US efforts to contain China’s technological advancement could also ultimately trigger strong retaliation, but the two sides are currently seeking to stabilize ties.
U.S. President Joe Biden shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping as they meet on the sidelines of the G20 leaders' summit in Bali.
Biden and Xi’s Bali face-off: Agenda, forecast, and sticking points
On Monday, US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping met for their first face-to-face meeting since Biden was elected in 2020. “I look forward to working with you, Mr. President, to bring China-U.S. relations back to the track of health and stable development for the benefit of our two countries and the world as a whole,” Xi told Biden.
What’s at stake: Stopping the Russia-Ukraine war, Taiwan’s sovereignty and defense, North Korea’s increased weapons testing, battling COVID, resumption of global supply chains, and tackling climate change.
What’s on the agenda: Bringing the relationship back to a functional mode with what the White House calls the establishment of “guardrails” and a “floor.” The US worries about China’s plans for Taiwan and Beijing’s expanding nuclear arsenal. Meanwhile, China criticizes the US for stoking tensions by forming regional blocs like the Quad and AUKUS in its neighborhood, empowering anti-China/pro-independence voices in Taiwan, and politicizing trade with tariffs and export controls.
The venue is important: The meeting takes place on the sidelines of the G-20, where 19 of the world’s richest nations and the European Union are gathering (Russia is a member, but President Vladimir Putin is skipping the event).
While the weather forecast is balmy for the summit in Bali, the political climate is hot. It takes place just months after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei in August prompted China to conduct military exercises showcasing its readiness to cut off or invade Taiwan. And it comes mere weeks after Washington imposed a series of export blocks designed to reduce China’s capacity to produce and access advanced computer chips, which form the technical core of China’s scientific and military industries. The measures enjoyed bipartisan support, a rarity in Washington.
Both leaders are riding high. Xi recently secured a norm-defying third term in office and is more powerful than ever with a Politburo lined exclusively with loyalists. Biden just defied expectations in the midterm elections, with Democrats retaining control of the US Senate and awaiting results for several House races, though odds are slightly in the Republicans’ favor.
But trust is low: While the White House says the two sides will “deepen lines of communication,” neither side has tried to win the other over. Washington claims Xi has done nothing to kick off talks about nuclear weapon containment, which the Chinese president suggested he would do last year. Meanwhile, Biden has antagonized China by publicly declaring four times that the US will come to Taiwan’s defense if China attacks (a point the White House has had to walk back).
Team Biden is in play: Biden’s using the trip to Southeast Asia not just to attend three back-to-back summits over six days but also to shore up America’s regional partners and allies to counter China. He’s signed a strategic partnership to work with ASEAN, the powerful Southeast Asian trading bloc that he’s calling “the heart” of the administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy. He’s reaffirmed the trilateral partnership with Japan and South Korea to secure and denuclearize the Korean peninsula, and he’s warned China that it can help or watch the region further militarize. Biden has also said he will be briefing Taiwan’s leaders about what Xi has to say, much to Beijing’s chagrin.
Biden’s policies aren’t very different from Trump’s, but his methods are. While his Republican predecessor wanted to confront China, slap tariffs, and implement controls on trade (all policies Biden has retained and/or reinforced), he also wanted to tackle China alone. Biden, however, has prioritized working with friends and allies to counter Beijing.
While the White House has warned there will be no clear deliverables from Monday’s meeting, the fact that China changed its position last month from not being interested in the huddle to Xi declaring that Beijing is ready to cooperate is a diplomatic win in itself for Washington. But while Xi has been characteristically mute in the run-up to the meeting, Biden’s been the opposite, managing expectations that he wants “competition, not conflict.” The personal connection between the two leaders will also likely factor into the meeting.
“I know him well. He knows me,” Biden told reporters on Saturday. “We just got to figure out where the red lines are and … what are the most important things to each of us going into the next two years.”
But that in itself is an issue.
Biden and Xi are operating with very different levels of authority. Xi doesn’t have to deal with a two-year horizon like Biden does. He essentially has total control over the world’s second-most powerful country, and after his third five-year term, he might even stick around longer. Plus, he’s got clout in the G-20: While some of the group’s members are America’s allies, many are also among China’s best customers.
Importantly, while Biden may have the wind in his sails following the midterms, experts are warning not to take certain initiatives for granted with the newly elected Congress, regardless of which party retains control. These include the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework that the White House introduced as an alternative to the doomed Trans-Pacific Partnership last summer, and which Biden touted on Sunday with trade partners at the East Asia Summit in Cambodia.
“There are going to be lots of questions [in the new Congress] about what's actually in the IPEF because there hasn't exactly been a ton of information yet, so there'll be questioning,” said Tobias Harris, deputy director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund.
Biden could even come up against opposition from his own party. “Trade is clearly an issue that still cuts across both parties. And people in Congress, like [Democratic Senator] Elizabeth Warren are concerned about how agreements are negotiated, and [about] transparency, and whether we agree to rules that don't help American workers,” Harris added.
Chances for a breakthrough: Biden upped the ante before the talks, saying he would make no “fundamental concessions” to Xi about Taiwan’s defense. Meanwhile, the Chinese have warned that the US needs to “stop politicizing, weaponizing, and ideologizing trade issues.”
But even as he talks big about Taiwan, North Korea, and indeed the region while aiming to set up “guardrails” for stabilizing the world’s most important bilateral relationship, Biden's executive powers to deal with Xi’s China are limited by checks and balances. The same can't be said for President Xi.
This was featured in Signal, the daily politics newsletter of GZERO Media. For smart coverage of global affairs that normal people can understand, subscribe here.