foreign policy
coronavirus
The Pandemic Will Make U.S.-China Relations Much Worse
Editor-in-Chief, SupChina.com
Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute
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Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
May 5th, 2020
The only single issue on which there is any bipartisan consensus in the United States right now is the need to get tough on China. U.S.-China relations were already at a low point before COVID-19. The pandemic is going to make them much worse.
This would be true even if the Trump administration was not trying to distract from its negligent handling of COVID-19. But the current rhetoric out of the White House (despite the president's stated affection for Xi Jinping) is leaving Trump's opponents little room to change course.
Why were relations so bad, even before COVID-19? America has a number of legitimate grievances with China. To list just a few:
• Unfair business practices and industrial policies including state subsidies and murky relationships with Chinese "champion" companies.
• Militarization of the South China Sea.
• Hacking and espionage.
• Wholly nonreciprocal arrangements in a huge range of fields from investment to the treatment of journalists.
• A hell's catalogue of human rights abuses including modern day concentration camps in Xinjiang that have interned more than a million Uyghurs, detention of lawyers, journalists, activists, and the steady destruction of civil society in China.
China's lack of transparency about COVID-19, and its aggressive propaganda and diplomatic efforts, have only aggravated the situation. I don't believe General Spalding would disagree with me about any of that. Where we perhaps differ is on what to do about it.
My fear is that the anti-China mood in Washington D.C., which a recent Pew survey indicates is now spreading throughout the country, is blinding us to the dangers ahead. We cannot simply decouple economically from China overnight, even if that was the best way forward. And does anyone really want a war, or even a financial war?
I believe we need to put a lot more thought into what went wrong in the relationship and how to change it. I also think that we need to consider how our actions affect the choices the Chinese Communist Party and its leader Xi Jinping will make. There needs to be a strategy, not a shouting match. But right now, the one-note blame-China chorus is drowning out all other voices, to the detriment of our decision-making.
Finally, the Trump administration is badly damaging what little shreds of credibility it had left by so vigorously promoting the "Wuhan lab" theory that American allies, including Australia and Britain, don't find tenable. This is also making the administration's claims of special knowledge of the dangers of Huawei less credible. All of this gives China the upper hand in promoting its propaganda to the world. It also makes the Chinese government even less likely to trust the U.S. government in trade — or any other kind — of negotiations in the future.
So, in a phrase: COVID-19 is going to make U.S.-China relations much worse. And it will make it much more difficult for America to rally its friends and allies in any campaign to change China's behavior.
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