Zha Daojiong. Asian Perspective. Volume 45, Issue 1, Winter 2021.
At a think-tank roundtable discussion in Beijing in late December 2019, a former deputy secretary of the US State Department opined, in a clearly exasperated tone, “what’s left in common between our two countries?” His view reflected what increasingly was becoming the norm. It was also, in many ways, an accurate view of shared frustrations in both China and the United States over the seeming impossibility of making meaningful progress on myriad bilateral issues that ought to garner attention among concerned American and Chinese discussants. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic following the outbreak in Wuhan, the Trump administration closed the United States to travelers from China—a standard medical measure for containing the spread of unknown disease-causing viruses. But that set of events, which precipitated mutual blaming between Washington and Beijing, was a powerful reminder that fitting answers are conditional on where one sets his or her eyes.
In this article, I discuss setbacks to the interactions between the United States and China on the societal level resulting from the Trump administration’s turn to comprehensive confrontation. Bilateral cooperation in areas like public health, technology trade and development, law enforcement, and trade in food and energy has been severely curtailed. The consequences are likely to be felt in the years if not the decades to come, bringing about lose-lose competition not only for the two countries but also for those US allies and other countries directly and/or indirectly involved. My purpose in making this point is less to complain about policies undertaken by the United States than to remind readers that possible future efforts to repair damages to bilateral relations will have to begin with these and related areas that indisputably have a direct impact on individual welfare in the two societies.
The End of Public Health Cooperation
Beginning with public health, the trajectory of American contributions to the modernization of healthcare in China dates back to the first formal treaty signed between the two countries. The Treaty of Wangxia (Wanghsia), signed in 1844, was the first of its kind to allow the building of Western hospitals in urban concessions that the Qing Dynasty granted to Western powers and Imperial Japan. Half a century later, the University of Cambridge-trained medical doctor Wu Lien-teh, who had successfully led the containment of the northern Manchurian bubonic plague of 1910-1911, went on lecture tours of the United States, Japan, and Western Europe (Goh, Ho, and Phua 1987). He introduced practices like wearing face masks, separating infected patients from their families, and quarantining the local population. Industry legend has it that the face mask was first invented as a plague fighting tool in China. Publications, including those jointly authored since the last century by American and Chinese experts in academic and professional journals based in North America and Europe, serve as platforms for health science knowledge to disseminate among wider populations. Exchange of medical knowledge has benefited both Chinese and American societies. America has been one of the most prolific and persistent benefactors of public health progress in China throughout modern Chinese history.
But when the Trump administration challenged cooperation between the centers of disease control and prevention (CDC) of the two countries, which strengthened in the wake of the Severely Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in parts of China in 2002-2003, the dynamics of exchange came to a halt. Among other things, Trump ordered termination of postings of US CDC experts to train field epidemiologists at China’s CDC, a decision that was fully implemented by the summer of 2019 (Taylor 2020). As a result, US public health institutions suffered from losing an opportunity to directly observe outbreaks of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) that very winter. Under Trump’s “America First” doctrine, health cooperation with China now was viewed as a loss as it supposedly assisted China to be a more capable rival to American power, influence, and status. It was an open challenge to the logic of international health as providing mutual protection and improving a country’s national security.
The Trump administration’s push back against China’s progress in technology makes no distinction between strategic technologies, which allow corporations of the respective countries to prevail in global competition, and general-purpose technologies such as those for development of vaccines essential for bring an international pandemic and/or local epidemic under control. Invalidation of the spirit of science to serve the welfare of humanity, including wholesale termination of the Fulbright scholar exchange program with China, is hardly justifiable. Even in times of ongoing warfare, as has happened in the past between the two countries, knowledge exchange in public health was always deemed essential.
Limiting Technology Exports
US control of technology exports to China has a history that dates back well before the Trump administration—in fact, to the waning years of the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s (Cain 1995). One arguably credible impetus behind the Chinese government’s formal launching of its “Made in China 2025” ambition of technology development is dismay over having failed to gain a sympathetic hearing for its decades-long reasoning that a lessening of export controls would be conducive to improving trade imbalances between the two economies. The Trump administration’s determined drive to curtail the telecommunications company Huawei and other high-tech Chinese companies outside Chinese borders helped to convince Chinese, and possibly other societies around the world, that competition, not geopolitical status-driven denial, can be an acceptable logic in interactions between countries.
One week after Huawei and other Chinese companies were put on an “entities list” subject to US economic sanctions, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), headquartered in New York but with chapters around the world including Beijing, proactively moved to implement sanctions on Huawei. The Institute announced that Huawei employees, who are members of IEEE, would be denied opportunities to conduct peer reviews of its journals in late May 2019 (Mervis, 2019). The decision was retracted after protest from the profession, but the impact lingers. In some ways, IEEE’s New York office management has a basis to claim that it was merely following US laws, as it had previously taken similar actions against chapters and members of Iran, Sudan, Cuba, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and Ukraine. It is also true that telecommunication technologies have a civilian-military (dual use) capability. Compliance with the law of the land of operation is a basic requirement for business and professional entities.
Nevertheless, how can curtailment and even prohibition of improvement in telecom and other technologies essential for societal progress in a politically-driven sanctions program reduce enmity among its populace? Even if the IEEE decision is justified on the grounds of corporate competition, will not enhancement of local engineers’ capacity to digest American technology be in the interest of those preferred corporations’ chance of selling locally? Doesn’t a breakthrough in technological thinking funded by Chinese sources and shared through the IEEE platform also benefit their American peers? Isn’t the IEEE, whose action sets off butterfly effects on other professional associations for fear that they too might be caught on the wrong side of US economic sanctions, actually driving home a message to Chinese society that internationalization of scientific research and experiment is a dead end? Of course, the root cause for this is the ever-expanding extraterritoriality of US sanctions that the Trump national security team has blatantly carried out.
Blocking Legal Cooperation
The US Department of Justice’s China Initiative, launched in November 2018, led to approximately one thousand active investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as of February 2020 (Lewis 2020). The Initiative’s umbrella creates an all-inclusive conception of the threat and attaches a criminal taint to entities that have even a tangential connection to China. To be sure, the United States is not the only country that pursues goals such as deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and retribution when it comes to cross-territorial entanglements with other countries.
Interactions between judicial branches of the US and Chinese governments since the two countries normalized their diplomatic relations had seldom been congenial before Trump took power. But his campaign, which included getting tough on China, led to the termination of cooperation in bilateral judicial matters in 2017—a further erosion of whatever basis had been left for amelioration of relations. Once activated, a case of law takes years to go through its course, which in turn helps to strengthen voices of less or even no further cooperation from the targeted country. If anything, as law enforcement is by nature domestically oriented, actions under the China Initiative are more likely to lend support to those voices in China that oppose compliance with what the American legal profession may claim to be international legal norms.
Granted, lawmaking and law enforcement are sovereign choices. In cross-national contexts, what one side defines as a countermeasure or self-help is often rejected as illegitimate, making distinctions between law and politics murky. Increasingly, though, the United States demands that other countries enforce its secondary and/or tertiary sanctions against Chinese entities, no matter how strongly erga omnes in arguments made about legal principle cause fractures among entities and individuals in much broader contexts. China is showing signs of following in US footsteps on matters of extraterritoriality as well. The ongoing tendency of both governments to compete in demanding that the rest of the world follow their own version of the law is hardly conducive to harmonization of international law.
Risk Aversion in Food and Energy Security
“National security”-driven sanctions by the United States against China are having a discernible impact on a sense of normalcy among individuals and companies that deal in “sensitive” technology. Talk of decoupling between the two countries helps bring back memories of the US-led economic embargo against China in the two decades before the détente initiated by President Richard Nixon. A case in point is spring 2020 when the Chinese government made ensuring supplies of energy and food one of the six bottom-line tasks of national economic policy. Common sense might have it that China could increase food purchases from the United States as a handy remedy, particularly in the context of the “Phase One” trade deal the two governments signed in January 2020. But fear of the United States weaponizing food sales, and by extension its potential interdiction of Chinese food imports from third countries, is a factor behind repeated Chinese emphasis on ensuring domestic supply to the maximum possible level. The irony is that talk of food power aside, the United States in recent decades has only occasionally used grain sales as a diplomatic tool. But the overall steady deterioration of relations today is driving China to an ecologically unsustainable pursuit of food self-sufficiency.
Similar dynamics of risk aversion apply to energy, which is also a prominent commodity in the trade agreement. Elementary theories of trade economics would have it that intra-company and/or intra-industry trade are conducive to hedging against volatilities in world markets of bulk commodities. Even without the drop in US liquified natural gas (LNG) production caused in large part by COVID-19, an increase in US LNG export capacity is conditional upon capital investment in export terminals. China can incentivize long-term importation from the United States by opening its LNG receiving terminals and end-user distribution to American companies. With the Trump administration’s vetting of investment from China away from infrastructure projects, however, such basic ideas of industrial vertical integration have become political taboo.
The result is that neither country is making much of a meaningful contribution to reducing carbon emissions, as China sticks to coal rather than expanding consumption of the relatively cleaner LNG as a vault against uncertainties in foreign economic environment. For over a century, scientists have identified carbon emissions from household and industrial sources as a key source of intensified extreme weathers and climate change. While health scientists are still debating the impact of climate change on the coronavirus, which is going on far longer than initially thought, research related to other illnesses do suggest that the risk of pandemics is growing as rising temperatures ignite animal migrations and other changes.
Conclusion
One term of a US president is sufficient for setting in motion a pattern of policy choice, many aspects of which are more likely than not going to survive a successor administration, regardless of the outcome of US presidential elections in November 2020. Trump’s China policy differs from its overall tendency toward unilateralism by forging alliances with the “Five-Eye” states of Australia, Canada, Britain, and New Zealand, each of which has made a clear choice to join the United States in dealing with China. The result is reinforcement of Chinese apprehensions about their country’s past of colonialism, which in turn lends credibility, ironically, to Chinese arguments against making political changes in conformity with Western images for the sake of affirming national sovereignty. Granted, China does share responsibility for the resulting state of affairs in its overall international relations. The cumulative effect amounts to a shakeup of the fundamentals of bilateral ties between China and the United States. There has been no shortage of Chinese complaints, condemnation, and even inflated attacks against US behavior. The two countries do compete on several fronts. As I have recounted, damage to their respective societies are just as mutual. The real competition, as is becoming increasingly obvious, is in respective capacities for self-reflection and policy change. Such change is imperative in order to dispel a sense of calamity at the individual and societal levels.