By Matthew Knott
China-US superpower showdown Credit:Matthew Absalom-Wong
The presidents’ speeches were three days apart, the first in Geneva and the second in Washington. Together they offered the world a striking glimpse of the shifting power dynamics in the battle for pre-eminence between China and the United States.
Speaking at the United Nations office in Switzerland, Chinese President Xi Jinping sought to portray his country as a benevolent rising giant, a nation that other countries could trust to do the right thing for the planet.
“We will build a circle of friends across the whole world,” Xi said in January 2017. “China will never seek expansion, hegemony or sphere of influence.”
Later that week Donald Trump stood on the steps of the US Capitol to deliver his inauguration speech. Global leaders – and their citizens – watched as the incoming president doubled down on the nationalist and populist rhetoric that propelled him to the White House.
“We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital and in every hall of power,” Trump declared. “A new vision will govern our land from this day forward: it’s going to be only America first.”
The takeaway was clear. China was reaching out to the world while America was turning inward, retreating from its self-styled status as the only “indispensable” power in global affairs.
Post-Pax Americana
America emerged from the Cold War not just the world’s biggest economy and strongest military power, but its sole diplomatic colossus. It seemed there was no viable alternative to US-style democracy and free market capitalism, an argument famously proposed by Francis Fukuyama in his book The End of History and the Last Man.
No other nation could match America’s long-standing alliances and its global network of embassies and consulates. When conflict broke out in the Balkans, Africa or the Middle East, the world looked to America to sort it out.
But then came the September 11 attacks, the Iraq War and the global financial crisis. The once swaggering superpower was now distracted, divided and increasingly demoralised.
The bookshops of Washington were full of books with titles such as America in Retreat, The Post-American World and The End of the American Era. Trump’s election, and the country’s botched response to the coronavirus pandemic, only supercharged this narrative of inevitable decline.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party had extended its diplomatic reach throughout the world – an effort that accelerated following Xi’s ascension to general secretary in 2012.
In 2016, China had the third largest diplomatic network in the world, behind the United States and France. In 2019, having already overtaken France, China leapfrogged the US in the number of diplomatic posts, according to the Lowy Institute.
Alongside the embassies came hard cash, as China poured money into developing countries in Asia, Africa and the United States’ backyard of Latin America.
Build it and they will follow
China’s approach to economic statecraft is typified by the Belt and Road Initiative, a massive project sweeping across Asia, the Pacific and Europe to connect trade, transport, digital networks and infrastructure. Although Chinese officials would never say so publicly, their expectation was that the largesse would help convince recipient nations to take its side in geopolitical disputes.
That’s what happened. In recent years nations such as El Salvador, Solomon Islands, and Kiribati have severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan as they cosied up to China.
An emblematic example came in 2019 when 22 nations – including Australia, Germany and Britain – issued a joint letter to the UN Human Rights Council condemning China’s mass detention of Uighur Muslims and other minorities in the Xinjiang region.
China responded with a letter of its own, signed by 50 countries (including the Palestinian Authority), deriding the supposedly “groundless accusations” and expressing “firm opposition to relevant countries’ practice of politicising human rights issues, by naming and shaming, and publicly exerting pressures on other countries”. Notably, 23 of the countries backing China were Islamic-majority nations and three signatories – Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia – host US military bases on their soil.
The “22 vs 50 split”, according to two scholars at the Jamestown Foundation think tank, showed that China “increasingly sets the rules of the game in the international arena”.
“China has enhanced its global presence tenfold since Xi Jinping has come to power,” says Elizabeth Economy, a senior fellow in China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Meanwhile, she said “president Trump didn’t value alliances, didn’t value multilateral institutions, didn’t value American leadership on global challenges”.
In 2019 Malaysia’s then prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, spoke for other leaders in the region when he said that if forced to choose between China and the US, he would take the “rich” former over the “unpredictable” latter. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen was even more blunt, asking: “If I don’t rely on China, who will I rely on?”
A missed opportunity
And yet, as Trump was driving perceptions of the US to record lows around the world, something else was happening. China was sabotaging its diplomatic ambitions and, in some cases, driving countries back into the arms of the US.
Xi’s claim that China does not seek hegemony or a sphere of influence is one that many citizens around the world now regard as laughable.
Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, says: “I don’t think China really took advantage of the opportunities the Trump administration presented to it.”
Elizabeth Economy, author of The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State, says: “It’s actually incredibly surprising the extent to which China’s trade and investment has not translated into greater popularity for Xi Jinping and China writ large.
“China has essentially shot itself in the foot.”
In his 2020 book How China Loses: The Pushback against Chinese Global Ambitions, Luke Patey argues that China’s economic empire building, aggressive diplomacy and military expansion is undermining its ambition to dominate world affairs.
While low-income countries have mostly welcomed Chinese investment, the resulting Belt and Road projects have not necessarily enhanced goodwill towards China. The projects are often built using temporary Chinese migrants rather than local workers and many have been ensnared in bribery scandals. The quality of the resulting infrastructure is not always high: 26 people died in Cambodia in 2019 after a Chinese-owned building collapsed in Sihanoukville, a Chinese special economic zone.
The Sri Lankan government’s experience with a Chinese-financed shipping port – which it had to turn over to China via a 99-year lease after failing to make repayments – led other nations to downsize or cancel their own BRI projects to avoid the pitfalls of “debt-trap diplomacy”.
Not all analysts agree that Belt and Road is designed to bait and trap developing nations. Shahar Hameiri from the University of Queensland argues that Sri Lanka’s own financial mismanagement was the root cause of its debt distress, not avaricious lending by Beijing.
In the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter magazine, he writes: “This is the BRI’s reality – messy and fragmented. It is also often problematic, but not because of China’s strategic planning. To paraphrase Hanlon’s razor: never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.”
Wine and shotguns
Then there has been China’s increasingly confrontational approach to spreading its message, often described as a turn to wolf warrior diplomacy.
China’s ambassador to Sweden, Gui Congyou, typified this approach by saying in 2019: “We treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we got shotguns.” Gui was speaking after PEN Sweden awarded a prize to Gui Minhai, a Chinese-born Swedish book publisher who has been sentenced to a 10-year jail term in China.
China tried to use its muscle to stop Swedish officials from attending the prize ceremony, a campaign that drew a defiant response from Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven: “We are not going to give in to this type of threat. Never.”
Sweden – famous for its commitment to neutrality – is now arguably Europe’s most hawkish China critic. It has ended all agreements with Confucius Institutes and scrapped sister city relationships with China. A Pew Research poll found unfavourable perceptions of China in Sweden soared from 49 per cent in 2017 to 85 per cent in 2020.
In Australia, which felt China’s wrath for calling for an international investigation into the origins of COVID-19, negative perceptions of the country’s biggest export destination jumped from 32 per cent to 81 per cent in three years. In Canada, negative perceptions jumped from 40 per cent to 73 per cent following a trade row and the arrest of Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig in Beijing on espionage charges.
Negative perceptions of China have spiked in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and France. The vast majority of citizens in these countries say they have no confidence Xi Jinping will do the right thing for the world.
“The time of European naivete has ended,” French President Emmanuel Macron declared in 2019. “For many years we had an unco-ordinated approach and China took advantage of our divisions.”
In the same year, the European Union began openly referring to China as a “systemic rival”; the 30-member NATO alliance has also toughened its stance.
Chinese Communist Party foreign affairs chief Yang Jiechi and the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken square off during the opening remarks of the Alaska bilateral talks, March 18, 2021.Credit:Fair dealing
The unease extends to China’s own backyard, where it has antagonised neighbours with its military adventurism in the South China Sea. A poll of citizens in 13 south-east Asian countries released this year by the ASEAN Studies Centre found that 63 per cent of respondents have little to no confidence in China to do the right thing, up from 52 per cent two years earlier. If forced to align themselves with one of the superpowers, 62 per cent said they would choose America.
“The Chinese government has a fiercely hierarchical world view that believes south-east Asian nations and other small countries should basically be vassal states that do what Beijing says,” says Charles Dunst, a visiting scholar at the East-West Centre in Washington.
“That causes immense frustration.”
He adds: “If China’s goal is to integrate south-east Asia into a clear Sino-centric system they are falling short.”
A GLOBAL DIVIDE
Herve Lemahieu, director of the power and diplomacy program at the Lowy Institute, says a clear divide is emerging in the contest for diplomatic clout. While the US is dominant with wealthy and democratic nations, China is leading with authoritarian and low-income countries. Polls show citizens of many African nations feel more positively about China’s influence than Europeans and south-east Asians.
“China is more active and more polarising in its diplomacy than the US,” Lemahieu says. “It has more partnerships with other countries, but they’re largely superficial. The US has deeper partnerships with fewer but more important countries.”
Elizabeth Economy, a senior fellow for China studies at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, believes China falls short as a diplomatic power except when promoting its own narrowly-defined interests.
“I haven’t seen much evidence that China has been able to step up, bring countries together and forge consensus on global challenges.” Its failure to assume a global leadership on climate change during the Trump years is just one example, she says.
China retains systemic advantages over the US, a nation that can be weighed down by the elaborate network of checks and balances that defines its democracy. Five months into his presidency, Joe Biden has not had a single ambassadorial appointment confirmed by the US Senate. And it’s possible Trump could be back in office within four years, flipping the switch back to America First isolationism. One-party states like China can move more quickly, while planning further into the future.
Since coming to power, Biden has focused on repairing America’s relationships with its traditional allies. The Lowy Institute’s Lemahieu says Biden must also go out of his comfort zone and reach out to the “hedgers” – the countries hedging their bets between the US and China. Crucially, this will involve wooing non-democratic nations such as Vietnam.
But Biden earns praise for moving quickly to restore America’s status as a global leader. He has rejoined the World Health Organisation, re-engaged the World Trade Organisation and re-entered the Paris climate accord. He organised climate leaders’ summit that elicited new carbon reduction pledges from Britain, Canada and Japan. He has elevated the status of the “quad” – a grouping between the US, India, Japan and Australia – as a crucial counterbalance to China’s influence in the Asia-Pacific.
And he has announced the US will donate 500 million Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine doses to other countries on top of 80 million already committed. China moved quickly in the “vaccine diplomacy” race, but the US is now poised to take the lead and capitalise on any resulting goodwill.
“The United States hit a low under the Trump administration, but we’re a resilient country, we change our leadership and we correct our policies,” says Bonnie Glaser. “We’re now coming out of a nadir and China is trending downward.”
Elizabeth Economy says: “A lot of trust building still needs to happen, but the Biden team has put the United States back on track in a very effective way.”
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