Chapter 30: From Feeding the Dragon to a Comprehensive Rival (Part II)

On April 8, 2021, the U.S. Congress released the Strategic Competition Act of 2021, drafted by the Senate and also known as the “Bipartisan Comprehensive China Act.” This legislation provided the world with a clear guide to understanding the U.S. China strategy of “competing where competition is necessary, cooperating where cooperation is possible, and confronting where confrontation is unavoidable.” The main provisions of the act include strengthening U.S. diplomatic strategy to address challenges posed by the Chinese government; reaffirming U.S. commitments to its allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region and around the world; and calling for the United States to reassert its leadership in international organizations and other multilateral forums. It reiterates commitments to allies and partners, prioritizes security assistance to the Indo-Pacific, and enhances U.S. diplomatic efforts to address challenges posed by China in the Western Hemisphere, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Arctic, and Oceania. It invests in universal values and authorizes a broad range of human rights and civil society measures, including support for democracy in Hong Kong and sanctions targeting forced labor, forced sterilization, and other abuses in Xinjiang. It focuses on countering China’s predatory international economic practices, including tracking intellectual property violations, Chinese government subsidies, monitoring China’s use of Hong Kong to circumvent U.S. export controls, and tracking the presence of Chinese companies in U.S. capital markets. It directs the United States to provide technical assistance to countries committed to combating foreign corruption and to offer debt relief to the poorest countries requesting forbearance due to the COVID-19 pandemic. By investing in technology, global infrastructure, digital connectivity, and cybersecurity partnerships, the act seeks to enhance U.S. competitiveness and strengthen efforts to counter the CCP’s influence and malicious activities. The act’s bipartisan support demonstrates that “the scope, scale, and urgency of the China challenge leave no room for complacency.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that China is “the only country with the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to seriously challenge the stable and open international system—everything that underpins the rules, values, and relationships we want the world to operate by.” The relationship between the United States and China should be one of “daring to compete, being adept at cooperation, and not fearing confrontation. Dealing with China requires speaking from a position of strength.” The global distribution of power is changing, bringing new threats, especially from China. Among America’s competitors, only China has the potential to combine economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to sustain a challenge to a stable and open international system. China expert Gordon Chang, the Chinese American author of The Coming Collapse of China, also said in an interview with Fox News that China is America’s primary adversary, and that countries such as Russia, Iran, and North Korea are able to challenge the international order because China empowers them. “This is a China problem,” he said. “It’s not an Iran problem or a Russia problem; it’s a Beijing-led problem, because China is profoundly hostile to the United States—an inherent hostility of that type of regime.”

This hostility stems from the fundamental differences between the two political systems. At the U.S.–China Anchorage talks, the U.S. side made clear its serious concerns—shared with its allies and partners—about China’s behavior, and articulated U.S. policies, priorities, and worldview. The Chinese side, represented by Yang Jiechi, pushed back by claiming to uphold “common values of all humanity” and the existing international system, rather than an order based on rules set by a small number of countries. He argued that “the United States has American-style democracy, China has Chinese-style democracy,” and that the United States should first resolve its own human rights problems and should not lecture China on human rights or democracy. He boasted that the Chinese Communist Party and China’s political system enjoy the wholehearted support of the Chinese people, and that any attempt to change China’s social system is futile. U.S. sanctions against CCP officials involved in Hong Kong affairs were denounced as crude interference in China’s internal affairs that had aroused strong opposition among the Chinese people. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang were described as inseparable parts of Chinese territory, and China firmly opposed U.S. interference in its internal affairs, declaring that “the United States has no qualification to speak to China from a position of strength.”

Yang Jiechi sharply criticized the United States for “using its military power and financial hegemony to exercise long-arm jurisdiction and suppress other countries,” accusing Washington of abusing the concept of national security to obstruct normal trade and of inciting certain countries to attack China. He stated, “In front of China, the United States is not qualified to talk to China from a position of advantage. Even twenty or thirty years ago, the United States was not qualified to say such things, because this is not how you treat the Chinese people.” These statements reflected the profound differences and fundamental contradictions between the two countries, revealing how wide and how deep the divide has become. Thirty years ago, China needed the United States to enter the WTO; today, China’s position is entirely different. Some observers commented that “Yang Jiechi has turned into Hu Xijin.”

Yang Jiechi’s attack on the United States represented the highest-level performance of “wolf warrior diplomacy” and marked a turning point toward a new Cold War between China and the United States. This wolf-warrior posture was the first of its kind since Henry Kissinger’s visit to China in 1971.

Former Bloomberg correspondent in China Peter Martin noted in his book China’s Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy that in the early 1950s, Chinese diplomats were still groping for ways to represent a closed and paranoid political system to the outside world; by the 1990s, they tried to avoid accusing the United States and maintained a low-profile strategy of “biding time.” But by 2021, Chinese diplomats stepping onto the world stage had to adapt to a political system that had abolished term limits for its leader, established “reeducation” camps in Xinjiang, and was led by a ruler who boasted of the “clear advantages” of China’s system. Thus, a fire-breathing dragon emerged.

Zhong Wen concludes: The Chinese Communist Party and the United States are in an irreconcilably hostile relationship. All cooperation is superficial; beneath the surface, the relationship is entirely adversarial. So-called cooperation is merely the CCP’s attempt to exploit the United States to obtain technology and capital. CCP leader Xi Jinping often says that he hopes for non-confrontation, non-conflict, mutual respect, and win-win cooperation in U.S.–China relations. His actions, however, have already proven that this rhetoric is nothing more than a smokescreen. The lessons of history must not be forgotten.