Anti-China voices in US often miss the mark but on trade, they have a point

Two critics of Biden’s China policy have called for a strategy similar to Ronald Reagan’s approach to the Soviet Union
Despite building regional alliances, the Biden administration has shied away from restarting free trade negotiations with allies and partners in Asia

Robert Delaney

Published: 5:30am, 16 Apr 2024

Why you can trust SCMP

In America’s hyperpartisan environment, opinions about what’s wrong with Joe Biden’s China policy are as unnecessarily numerous as the surgical masks clogging up our utility drawers and glove compartments.

Pontification from lawmakers who assume that Singaporeans have ties to China’s Communist Party because of their ethnicity, or those claiming that “China has a 5,000 year history of cheating and stealing” should be put in the same bin as the overused masks.

But if you’re determined to find something in the anti-China echo chamber that’s worth debating, read the Foreign Affairs essay by former US National Security Council official Matthew Pottinger and US representative Mike Gallagher, calling for a pivot to what would amount to Ronald Reagan’s approach to the Soviet Union in the early 1980s.

The central premise is logical. They contend that Beijing seeks to exhaust Washington by taking contrary positions – or simply declining to act at all – on Ukraine, the Middle East, the Red Sea or any other locus of international conflict in which the US has a stake.

The gusto with which the Chinese leadership has still embraced Moscow after Russian forces invaded Ukraine – as we saw with last week’s visit to Beijing by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov – and the way China and Russia lock arms at the United Nations on Gaza, backs the authors up.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s administration will never be a US ally. The Biden administration’s wish to get Beijing to use its leverage to end these conflicts in a way that takes Israel’s and Ukraine’s security interests into consideration will never come true.

China’s Representative to the United Nations Zhang Jun meets colleagues at the UN Security Council amid a vote on a Gaza resolution that demanded an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan, on March 25. Photo: Reuters

But the resumption of dialogue that we’ve seen between the US and China since Biden met Xi in California isn’t useless, particularly given the success Biden has had in building alliances in China’s neighbourhood.

The trilateral summit with Japan and South Korea last year, and the whirlwind of meetings between Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr last week strengthens the hand US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will bring to his coming visit to Beijing.

These engagements, along with the Aukus security pact, the Quad leaders summit and the establishment of the US-EU Trade and Technology Council, as well other similar initiatives – what the administration refers to as America’s “latticework” of partnerships and alliances – more than fulfil the recruitment of “a broader coalition to confront China” that Pottinger and Gallagher call for in their essay.

Blinken isn’t expecting to sway his counterparts in Beijing. The trip, like those of Treasury secretary Janet Yellen, commerce secretary Gina Raimondo and others in the administration help them counter the containment narrative that China projects globally about the US government: that it will do anything to undermine China’s development.

US ambassador to China Nicholas Burns and US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen sample beer at a craft brewery in Beijing on April 8. Photo: AP

Even with ever-expanding commitments from other countries in Asia to cooperate economically and militarily, which blunt the lead in these areas that Beijing has spent heavily on, US officials will bring olive branches to China. These efforts do not amount to weakness, as most Republicans insist. They provide opportunities for Washington to make its red lines clear.

There’s one valid criticism of Biden’s China policy that Pottinger and Gallagher skimmed over in a way that shows how, despite keeping a distance from the Republican Party’s authoritarian extremes, they are unable to completely break free.

They call on Biden to “upgrade [America’s] bilateral trade agreement with Japan and establish a new one with Taiwan, agreements that could be joined by other eligible economies in the region”.

The leader of their party, Donald Trump, rejected exactly this when he pulled the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the bloc that eventually became the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) after Japan picked up the pieces and brought it over the finish line with its 10 other members.

No end to US trade war with China, Biden policy document signals

Trump famously despises multilateral forums and giving market access without getting many pounds of flesh in return. He made the damage that free trade did to American workers a centrepiece of the campaign that brought him to the White House.

It was an issue that desperately needed addressing, and it has been through bills like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act or the Chips and Science Act that Biden championed and which Trump has disparaged because his campaign is based on grievances, not solutions.

Unfortunately, Biden’s team remains too cowed by the backlash against free trade to step up to the CPTPP negotiating table.

Pottinger and Gallagher are much more Reagan than Trump. They should know that America has enough clout to demand a high bar when it comes to CPTPP membership requirements, ones that Taiwan could meet and would be difficult for Beijing to fulfil.

They should have the fortitude to acknowledge that it’s now time for America to take the CPTPP seriously.

Robert Delaney is the Post’s North America bureau chief