Читать книгу After Engagement - Группа авторов - Страница 11

As China and the United States became increasingly attentive to the question of relative gains, the negative turn in bilateral relations spread beyond narrowly defined security issues. Especially in Washington, US assessments of various aspects of the relationship were “securitized”—reframed to fit into an overarching narrative that a comprehensive Chinese challenge to American security demanded a comprehensive response.⁴⁰

Technology-related issues, especially the security implications of advances in electronics, communications, and computers, became a significant factor in US-China relations. The prospect of cyberwarfare increased the intensity and broadened the scope of security competition in a rivalrous relationship.⁴¹ Advanced technologies integrated with weapons and command and control systems created new types of threats to inflict serious damage on enemy targets. They also gave each side incentives to prepare to be the first user in a conflict. With military effectiveness now heavily dependent on information technologies that are more vulnerable than the hardware of the weapons themselves, each country is driven to increase its readiness to act before the other side can disrupt its systems for assessing threats and coordinating military action.⁴² In addition, because each side cannot be sure about the other side’s doctrine for cyberwarfare or about the efficacy of new, still largely untested military technologies, both countries have incentives to build larger and more potent arsenals for using blunt force (air, sea, missile, or space weapons) to disable quickly the other side’s cyber-capabilities.⁴³

Cyberthreats also blur distinctions between military concerns, narrowly defined, and other security issues: military versus civilian networks; cyberspying that parallels traditional espionage versus that which seeks commercially valuable technology or the means to disable civilian systems; and operations undertaken by a foreign government versus criminal actions by nominally private actors with murky links to the state. Washington’s attribution to China of various types of cyberattacks (including but not limited to those targeting militarily useful and security-sensitive content) has aggravated bilateral relations and raised doubts in the US about the wisdom of continued economic and educational engagement that might enhance China’s cyber capabilities. Tighter American restrictions on Chinese investment in technology sectors, and on educational and scholarly access in STEM fields, reflected these worries about ever more intertwined security and economic issues.

A more rivalrous relationship also has changed the focus of US economic policy toward China, from traditional issues of trade and investment to concerns about the national security implications of technological competition and the vulnerabilities created by reliance on global supply chains in which Chinese producers are often critical links.⁴⁴ The difficulty the United States and state governments faced in securing adequate equipment for coping with the COVID-19 pandemic once these supply chains were disrupted deepened such concerns. It also reinforced the already-emerging judgment that US economic engagement with China was helping to make China richer and stronger, and that China’s relative economic gains could—ultimately, if indirectly—jeopardize American security.

Washington further tightened restrictions of Chinese investment through the CFIUS review process, including through the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018 (FIRRMA), which updated rules to deal with perceived new challenges from China.⁴⁵ Concerns about the security-related risks of economic entanglement with China also gave impetus to the Trump administration’s moves against Chinese telecommunications companies, including barring Huawei from the rollout of 5G infrastructure in the United States; trying to persuade US allies to do the same; threatening crippling restrictions on ZTE’s purchase of US components; putting Huawei and dozens of other firms on an expanding “entities list” that would prohibit purchases of critical inputs from US sources because of asserted threats to US national security; and moving to bar popular Chinese social media services TikTok and WeChat from US markets, also ostensibly on national security grounds.⁴⁶ With concerns mounting about the unwanted vulnerabilities that deep interdependence creates, the US also moved to toughen restrictions on Chinese nationals’ access to US universities’ education programs and research labs, on the grounds that access might lead to the acquisition of expertise and information that could give China an economic or military advantage.⁴⁷

Shifting American policies fed China’s worries about the implications of its own vulnerabilities, including dependence on US sources for crucial inputs to technologically advanced sectors vital to Beijing’s vision for the next stage of China’s economic modernization. Washington’s actions against Huawei and other PRC companies underscored that the US could and would exercise the leverage China’s dependence created. Even if modification of US policy toward Huawei and other Chinese firms were to become part of a US-China trade-plus agreement, it would not lead to a reversal of Beijing’s decision to emphasize mitigating China’s heavy reliance on foreign, especially American, suppliers for critical components. The heightened emphasis on greater economic self-reliance was underscored in China’s 14th Five-Year Plan, which was announced in 2020. Chinese critiques of the US’s newly hawkish approach to trade and related disputes portrayed Washington’s moves as yet another example of the American effort to impede China’s rise.⁴⁸

The turn toward rivalry and conflict in the bilateral relationship affected even seemingly routine aspects of economic ties. The defining feature of US-China economic relations during the Trump presidency became the “trade war”—an overly narrow term for a quickly escalating conflict over a wide range of economic issues. American complaints and demands were rooted in familiar, in some cases long-emerging, concerns: a substantial bilateral trade deficit; impediments to US firms’ access to Chinese markets (particularly in service sectors); shortcomings in China’s protection of US firms’ intellectual property and allegedly coerced contractual transfers of such intellectual property; Chinese state-owned enterprises’ latitude to play by non-market rules; Chinese export-promotion and import-impeding policies (including currency exchange rates); and China’s robust industrial policy (particularly in the form of state support for several key emerging technology sectors under the Made in China 2025 initiative and other policies for promoting an “innovation economy”).⁴⁹

With the president declaring that trade wars are “good and easy to win,” the Trump administration announced a series of punishing tariffs, with rising rates and expanding coverage.⁵⁰ The list of American grievances was vast. Some of it was highly questionable, such as the no longer well-founded charges that China was manipulating its currency’s value and a politically charged but economically irrelevant focus on the bilateral trade deficit. Moreover, the US demands presented to China lacked a clear sense of priority, frustrating Chinese interlocutors, and possibly reflecting unresolved disagreement within the Trump administration between those seeking a deal and those who were more interested in decoupling the US and Chinese economies.⁵¹

China responded in kind, with its own tariffs on imports from the United States. Chinese levies and shifts in purchases away from US suppliers focused on politically salient targets, such as Midwestern farmers, who had been crucial to Trump’s electoral victory. Beijing also flexed its administrative muscle to clarify that, aside from tariffs, it had other cards it could play, especially actions against US firms doing business in China. The PRC’s accelerating efforts to reduce its dependence on US suppliers in response to the trade war effectively, if unintentionally, made the decoupling sought by some in Washington more plausible. In sum, the long-prevailing belief that deepening economic interdependence was good for both parties and provided crucial ballast to a vital US-China relationship was unraveling.

Washington increasingly viewed Beijing’s economic engagement with other countries in similarly dark terms. The Trump administration, and other US critics, were skeptical about the BRI, Xi Jinping’s signature international economic policy, which pushes outbound investment in infrastructure and support for economic development across much of Asia and into Europe. They claimed the BRI was a nefarious strategy to increase Chinese political influence, using dubious tactics they labeled “debt trap diplomacy.”⁵²

Although the Xi and Trump administrations engaged in extensive and protracted negotiations on trade and related issues and reached preliminary deals, little progress was made on the core concerns. In part, this reflected mutual distrust. On the American side, long-simmering complaints about China’s poor implementation of legal commitments and policy promises on trade and other aspects of international economic relations reached a boiling point. On the Chinese side, there was considerable concern that a mercurial and transactional President Trump would not follow through on any agreement reached, or would pocket any concessions China made and then demand more.⁵³ This concern was exacerbated by Trump-era US decisions to withdraw from, or turn against, major international agreements and institutions—including ones (most notably the WTO) that Washington had long supported and once urged China to join and that US proponents of constructive engagement had seen as pathways to good bilateral relations and China’s socialization into a rules-based international order. The Biden administration’s agenda of returning to engagement with international institutions promised to ameliorate some of theses concerns, but it did not promise, or portend, an end to US concerns about the WTO, complaints about China’s economic policies and behavior, or increased nationalism in US economic policies (including in Biden’s “build back better” plan for a post–COVID-19 economic recovery).⁵⁴

Growing distrust compounded difficulties anchored in fundamental features of the international order. No economic deal struck between the US and China, or mere retrenchment of the Trump-era trade war and “America first” economic policies, could eliminate the gnawing fears endemic in a more rivalrous relationship between the two global giants shadowed by the uncertainty inherent in an anarchic international system that lacks a reliable means to enforce agreements.