foreign policy
coronavirus
Is the Era of Cooperation Between the U.S. and China Finished?
Journal of Political Risk
MacAndrews & Forbes
0
0
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
April 8th, 2020
The U.S. government should hold China legally responsible for its coverup of the COVID-19 virus. This includes, as Harvard Professor James Kraska argues, up to trillions of dollars in damages. The U.S. should also demand changes in China’s authoritarian political system, most importantly the lack of freedom of speech at the root of the pandemic.
Civil society in the U.S. has an important role to play in the crisis, including educating the public on the dangers of allowing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to continue its restriction of free speech, but also on its other threats, such as territorial expansionism and its military buildup.
While COVID-19 forces the U.S. to seek quiet cooperation with China, e.g., on the development of vaccines and acquisition of needed equipment like masks and ventilators, U.S. civil society should not undercut the government’s bargaining position, or mislead the public with false hopes of U.S.-China amity, by using the pandemic as yet another platform on which to publicly call for political cooperation with China. Yet the Asia Society in New York did just that in a statement dated April 3.
The Asia Society published its statement within two days of other calls for cooperation with China, including an April 2 letter by 100 Chinese scholars and an April 5 opinion in the New York Times by China’s Ambassador to the U.S. The Asia Society statement thus played into China’s COVID-19 propaganda efforts, and was amplified by China’s state media.
Rather than call for more cooperation with China, including the untrammeled free trade that decimated the U.S. medical products industry and caught the U.S. flat footed on COVID-19, U.S. civil society should focus on helping America truly understand China. This should include a recognition that the country has historically, and increasingly so since the rise of General Secretary Xi Jinping, acted aggressively against our values of liberty and democracy, and against the territory of our allies and friends in Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines.
U.S. civil society should work to help the world understand that the CCP has done so based on its praxis that might makes right. As Chairman Mao wrote in 1938, and as Xi Jinping practices in his militarization of China and its near abroad, “Political power grows from the barrel of a gun.”
The fruits of China’s economic growth have sadly been directed into a military buildup that is fueling an international arms race that includes highly destabilizing hypersonic delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons with accompanying threats from China to sink U.S. aircraft carriers.
With the broader threat that China poses in mind, U.S. civil society that supports freedom should close ranks on a tough message against the CCP, and let our government use that U.S. public opinion as a bargaining chip to extract maximum concessions from China’s government, including on trade, freedom of speech, human rights, democratization, and verifiable actions that support international peace.
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