WHEN JOE BIDEN addressed his first news conference as president on March 25, it took a while before he was asked a question on China. The president did not mince words. “China wants to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world. But that is not going to happen on my watch,” he said.
Biden won the presidential race by running as the antithesis of Donald Trump. But on China, his playbook is remarkably similar to that of Trump’s. The Biden administration has made it clear that its China policy will be marked by “stiff competition” across sectors. As President Xi Jinping seems to have cemented his hold over party and government, there are three broad areas where US-China competition will be felt the most: ideology, technology and geopolitics. Jean-Pierre Cabestan, Chinese expert at Hong Kong Baptist University, said the US and China were already in a cold war. “There is fierce technological competition and geostrategic and ideological rivalries. But this will be a new type of cold war because of the level of interdependence between China and the west,” he said.
On the ideological front, Biden will host a virtual ‘Summit for Democracy’ on December 9 and 10, bringing together leaders from around 100 countries. For the US, it is important to show that the existing system of democratic capitalism still works. The financial crisis of 2008, the chaotic Trump presidency and the growing polarisation within American politics have made Biden’s hand weaker, while China’s economic growth and political stability have shown that democracy is not a prerequisite for development.
While the US portrays the ideological battle as one between democracy and autocracy, for China, it is about “effective versus ineffective governance”, and it is ready to offer an alternative to the world. China says its method of selecting leaders is much better than the democratic system. It identifies promising young people who are tasked with running small towns, then big cities, followed by provinces. Only those who prove their mettle will be promoted to national leadership roles.
As sinologist Jude Blanchette tells The New Yorker, Xi’s narrative is that the “western democracy is a path to infighting, polarisation and institutional atrophy”, while the “Chinese political system is demonstratively superior in its ability to deliver practical governance outcomes”.
The immediate future of the ideological battle will, however, depend a lot on Europe. China could leverage its deep interlinkages with the European economy and could make use of the long-standing differences between the US and Europe over trade, technology and taxes. Still, Biden’s outreach efforts and Xi’s increasing authoritarian tendencies could help the US. “Europe will be a challenge for China,” said Avinash Godbole, Chinese expert at OP Jindal Global University, Haryana. “The UK has changed its policy and Germany, too, is moving away.”
“When the history of the 21st century is written, much of it will be centred right here in the Indo-Pacific,” said US Vice President Kamala Harris, in a speech aboard a US combat ship in Singapore during her Indo-Pacific tour in August. The region is of critical importance for the US. The world’s two most populous states (China and India) and the two most populous Muslim majority nations (Indonesia and Pakistan) are in the Indo-Pacific.
The region is home to seven of the world’s ten largest standing armies. Nearly 60 per cent of the global maritime trade passes through the Indo-Pacific. According to the US department of defence, “Indo-Pacific is the most consequential region for America’s future”. China, it says, seeks to reorder it by military modernisation and predatory economic practices.
For China, however, expanding its influence in its extended neighbourhood is a matter of strategic and economic necessity. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which is Xi’s signature project, is essentially an endeavour to establish a China-centric maritime and continental zone of influence in the Indo-Pacific.
Also at the centre of the Indo-Pacific conundrum is Taiwan. China, of late, has been quite vocal about annexing Taiwan, which would allow it to project power into the western pacific, threaten Japan and take over the province’s high value semiconductor sector. The fate of Taiwan will also determine America’s credibility in the Indo-Pacific.
“Biden has so far ticked all the boxes in the region by bolstering the US presence through the Quad (India, Japan, Australia and the US) and AUKUS (Australia, the UK and the US) summits, while also ensuring through the summit with Xi that the differences will not escalate into open confrontation,” said Uma Purushothaman, US expert at the Central University of Kerala. “This is something that will reassure countries in the region which are unwilling to accept Chinese hegemony, but do not want to get caught in the US-China rivalry.” That rivalry is only likely to intensify as China woos the region with its economic might, while the US relies on its security credentials.
On September 2, Nicolas Chaillan, the first chief software officer of the US air force, put in his papers, saying he could not bear to watch China overtake the US in technological transformation. “We have no fighting chance against China in 15-20 years,” he told the Financial Times, listing China’s advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning and cyber capabilities. Although some of Chaillan’s claims sound far-fetched, a US-China technological battle is brewing, and it could well be the final frontier of the confrontation between the two superpowers.
According to a report by the US National Counterintelligence and Security Center, America’s status as a global superpower depends on maintaining a lead in five key sectors: artificial intelligence, quantum computing, bioscience, semiconductors and autonomous systems. “These sectors produce technologies that will determine whether America remains the world’s leading superpower,” the report said.
Biden’s response to the Chinese challenge has been a slew of legislations aimed at increasing research and development spending on high-tech industries. Optimists in the Biden administration hope that with the Innovation and Competition bill, the $1.2 trillion infrastructure law and the $2.2 trillion Build Back Better bill, the US will be able to perform better in the technology race.
The Chinese government is, meanwhile, taking control of critical high tech industries and tech giants such as Huawei and Alibaba. It also plans to reduce its reliance on foreign suppliers. In 2020, China imported microchips worth $350 billion. It has also learned the lessons from American punitive strikes against Huawei and ZTE.
According to John Lee, senior analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, Berlin, one of the reasons for the tightening policy towards China’s internet platform giants is to shift resources towards strategic technology development to counter the growing pressure on China’s access to such technology. “Platform giants like Alibaba and Baidu are leading China’s push into cutting-edge chip design, supporting its development of industries and partnering with Chinese defence conglomerates,” he said.
The US, too, is looking at minimising its reliance on products and technologies with Chinese connections. “The best illustration of the new cold war is the attempt by the US and China to decouple their economies,” said Cabestan.
Despite the intense strategic competition, the US and China could find avenues of cooperation in critical areas such as climate science and global health challenges. The Xi-Biden virtual summit held on November 15 was a promising start. Moreover, despite their decoupling attempts, the two countries will remain intertwined economically in the foreseeable future. Bilateral ties are, therefore, likely to follow the trajectory predicted by Biden’s Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in his first policy address on March 3: “Our relationship with China will be competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be. The common denominator is the need to engage China from a position of strength.”