International Priorities - China Unstrained

Make no mistake; China may be such a large and necessary political and economic relationship that we cannot ignore, but China has definite aspirations that are totally focused on usurping and replacing American global influence. They are not and have never been our friend or trusted ally. Why is China’s brutal regime remotely attractive to so many in the world, while the US model seems to be fading and unable to deal with natural/medical disasters, slipping rapidly into dwindling global influence in virtually every corner of the world?

As the total refusal by the People’s Republic of China to honor its 1984 (effective 1997) treaty with the UK, to retain the British governance system for Hong Kong and political freedom until 2047, devolved into total political repression (pictured above), a reversal of democratic guarantees and mass arrests of people exercising the rights they were promised, many expected the world to press back… hard. The pandemic was now our focus. The once powerful America was distracted and deflected. The rise of the de facto Cold War rising between the United States and the PRC effectively left China without any potential for an American pushback. The US has thus effectively disqualified itself from any meaningful power or influence against Chinese expansionism. Kim Jong-un is also smiling.

Instead, the US pursuit of a policy of intentional isolationism, burning communications bridges with the PRC in search of someone to blame for the pandemic, blowing out trade agreements that hurt American farmers a whole lot more than the functioning Chinese economy, and unilaterally withdrawing from treaties and alliances, have left American foreign policy in tatters. There is a very real question as to whether the world will ever trust us again… when it was so easy for a US president to undo decades of American priorities in a single presidential term. Especially as Donald Trump has worked overtime to delegitimize the entire American election process. China has joyfully used compromised American power to act with no genuine outside restraint.

We know, for example, that China’s brutality has totally crushed Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang Province in western China: “[A leak of internal Chinese documents] was made to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which has worked with 17 media partners, including BBC Panorama and The Guardian newspaper in the UK… The investigation has found new evidence which undermines Beijing's claim that the detention camps, which have been built across Xinjiang in the past three years, are for voluntary re-education purposes to counter extremism.

“About a million people - mostly from the Muslim Uighur community - are thought to have been detained without trial…  The leaked Chinese government documents, which the ICIJ have labelled ‘The China Cables,’ include a nine-page memo sent out in 2017 by Zhu Hailun, then deputy-secretary of Xinjiang's Communist Party and the region's top security official, to those who run the camps… The instructions make it clear that the camps should be run as high security prisons, with strict discipline, punishments and no escapes.” BBC.com, 11/24/19.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative, effectively lending massive infrastructure funds to enable greater trade with the PRC to nations around the world, is rapidly replacing the United States as it withdraws foreign aid globally. Loans that wouldn’t realistically be timely repaid by most debtors even without an economy-decimating pandemic are used as bargaining chips that China unhesitatingly is willing to call. As the United States has become an unreliable source of agricultural goods – represented particularly well by American soybean farmers who seem to have permanently lost their biggest market – it has instead turned to build new supply lines, permanent ones, from other nations with a particular focus on South America and Africa. Brazil’s Mata Grosso, for example, is rapidly becoming one of China’s largest agricultural sources.

Having used landfill techniques to build a massive new and obviously militarized island (in the Spratly chain within the South China Sea), China is asserting its claims to that entire ocean region to the consternation of regional nations. US Naval vessels and aircraft continue to press against PRC claims to regional sovereignty, but American support for local governments challenges to Chinese claims has been shallow and wavering. It even gets down to natural resources; to China, the local undersea minerals and fossil fuels and associated fishing rights belong solely to them.

Writing for the November 15th Los Angeles Times, Shashank Bengali and Vo Kieu Bao Uyen provide a brutal example of China’s usurping traditional fishing lanes that have been used for centuries by regional nations. “On a warm, cloudless morning in June, a giant vessel blasted through the still waters of the South China Sea toward a wooden fishing boat painted in cerulean blue and flying the red flag of Vietnam.

“The veteran fishing captain cranked up the engine to flee, but the approaching ship dropped two motorized dinghies into the sea with uniformed officers aboard. The rubber crafts raced along either side of the fishing boat, squeezing it like a pincer… As the captain slowed to avoid a collision, the large ship was soon upon them. The large letters across its steel hull read: China.

“Crammed into their cabin for safety, the 17 men were knocked to the deck by a jolt that nearly tipped the boat. Then another. And another. ‘Like war,’ recalled crew member Nguyen Day… The Chinese vessel smashed the boat repeatedly, damaging the cabin. Four fishermen tumbled overboard. As the officers pulled them from the water, Day, 41, and the other Vietnamese men piled into lifeboats and watched their craft — laden with several hundred pounds of tuna, mackerel, grouper and flying fish — begin to float away.

“The June 10 attack was part of Beijing’s hard-nosed offensive in the South China Sea, where Chinese vessels are using increasingly aggressive tactics to deter rival nations and stake control over the strategic waterway.

“Unfazed by rising global criticism, China’s navy, coast guard and paramilitary fleet have rammed fishing boats, harassed oil exploration vessels, held combat drills and shadowed U.S. naval patrols. The escalating show of force has overwhelmed smaller Southeast Asian states that also claim parts of the sea, one of the world’s busiest fishing and trade corridors and a repository of untapped oil and natural gas… Beijing’s maritime expansionism illustrates not only the Chinese Communist Party’s growing military might but also its willingness to defy neighbors and international laws to fulfill President Xi Jinping’s sweeping visions of power.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping is China’s first “elected” (not by the people but by the Party) autocrat hellbent on developing lifetime rule based on a cult of personality that we last witnessed in the 1970s with Mao Zedong. His expansionist goals, his willingness to use all means to suppress oppression, are unambiguous. When challenged on that approach, he reminds the world that China has contained the novel coronavirus and is the only major economy on earth for which the IMF projected GDP growth (4.9% to be exact). The reason: because the PRC used force to contain the virus and anyone infected, and that process worked as democracies struggled. He is eager to point out Trump’s failures – and hence “American” failures – combined with the President’s denial of our election results and that the United States, with 4% of the world’s population and 20% of COVID infections, are clear evidence that China’s path is the correct path for everybody.

Still, China is anything but gentle in its approach. “In its strategic quest to dominate the waterway separating the Asian mainland from the island of Borneo and the Philippine archipelago, China has built military outposts on disputed islands and reefs that, according to Xi, ‘are Chinese territory since ancient times … left to us by our ancestors.’ The network of bases, harbors and landing strips deep in international waters has created a buffer for China’s southern coastline, further encircled Taiwan and challenged the Pentagon’s ability to move ships into Asia.

“‘It appears that China is rapidly developing the capabilities to exclude other navies from the South China Sea,’ Bill Hayton, an author and associate fellow at the Chatham House think tank, told a congressional commission in September… Under the Trump administration — which has called China a ‘bully’ seeking a ‘maritime empire’ — the U.S. sailed more warships than normal through the region in 2020 to assert navigation rights. But the operations have done nothing to claw back the islets and waters that five Southeast Asian nations and Taiwan claim Beijing has usurped.” LA Times. Remember, when Donald Trump tweeted that he had won a second term by a large margin, the official responsive tweet from the China’s People’s Daily was "HaHa🤣."

President-elect Joe Biden faces a hostile China that is actually open to engage the United States towards some semblance of re-normalization between the two nations. But we are unlikely to recapture the level of agricultural sales we have lost. Given the tariff wars, China is unlikely to trust us as reliable foodstuff suppliers. Yet our economy is a vital component of their economic solidity, so some levels of compromise are likely. Biden should press back on China’s brutality but stop the inane policy of blame. 

As much as Biden must let China know that it no longer has free reign to assert is military and economic power without consequence, in the region or in the rest of the world, he also needs to restore American aid to those nations that have been forced to turn to China as we withdrew, engage and rejoin treaties – from climate change and nuclear containment to multinational trade agreements – that create a bastion against China’s efforts to become the dominant global power. Bilateral treaties and bully tactics have only made us weaker. Biden also has to prove to the world that a democracy is completely able to contain the coronavirus. It’s a very big challenge.

I’m Peter Dekom, and Joe Biden has to let the world that the photographs of repression and naval confrontation are the accurate depictions of the true China… and not the United States… if we are ever to recapture even close to that influence that has been slip-sliding away.