Andrew Singer Talks About China

Vol. 3, Issue 9

Aug 27, 2024

The slates are set for the upcoming U.S. presidential election. The two main political parties have held their conventions. I have been thinking about China (big surprise) and the upcoming election. China is America’s most powerful and consequential global peer. What happens here has to be important in Beijing.

Does China prefer a return to Donald Trump’s way of seeing and dealing with the world or an approach by Kamala Harris that is likely to be generally similar to that of outgoing President Joseph Biden?

I have written an in-depth answer to this question. It is a long read (3,850± words) appended below this short introductory commentary. My answer explores the relationship between the two governments, the desires and fears of each, what I believe the biggest issues really are, and frankly, why the above question is off target.

At the recent Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Republican National Committee (RNC) Conventions, respective speakers mentioned the word, freedom, 227 and 67 times and the word, god, 100 and 300 times. China was seemingly not a big deal. The nominees for President and Vice President mentioned China and Chinese a grand total of nineteen times during the DNC and barely two times at the RNC. This, though, belies the specter of China looming in the American background.

And a specter it be, for the reasons I discuss below in greater detail. For those who want to read a brief, three-paragraph digest (though I do encourage spending several quiet minutes with a cup of tea or coffee reading the longer piece), here it is:

Though China may (or may not) try to tip the scales and if so, possibly in both directions, China ultimately does not really care who wins the U.S. presidential election because a) the real question is rather what kind of America does China want and b) whether Harris or Trump wins will not dramatically change the nature of the America China faces nor the trajectory of the U.S.-China relationship.
Both countries have a deep-seated faith that their power and success come from the unique benefits of their distinct cultures, beliefs, and systems. China wants and demands respect. China seeks flexibility and freedom to govern itself and its territory (a loaded term) without outside influence and interference. America is reflexively terrified of communism—as an ideology, political system, economic construct, and symbol. America feels threatened and anxious that its power and prestige are slipping away.
The best America for China is a nation that remains divided, rattled, and distracted, an America that is off kilter, waffling, and fearful. This America gives China more latitude to expand and extend its influence and thereby solidify its security and stability. The culture war, economic fragmentation, and political disharmony tearing America apart are gifts to China. And they are gifts that will likely not be in short supply moving into the future.

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Beijing Wants Who in the U.S. Election?

Dawn on Wednesday, November 6, 2024, will begin another fateful morning in America. The United States is supposed to be selecting the next President the day before.

Awash in the waves of digital ink being spilt gaming the election, who does China, America’s most powerful and consequential global peer, want to win the U.S. presidential election?

By China and America, I mean the respective governments of The People’s Republic of China and the United States of America. Governments represent the people they lead--those who agree and disagree with them, those who benefit and are harmed by them, and those (usually the broad masses) who are along for the ride. Individual citizens are diverse; citizenries are frightfully cohesive. The who/what/why/how of China or America refer to the respective government of each because it is these governments who shape and lead their acquiescent electorates.

The P.R.C. has an ENORMOUS stake in the outcome of the American election. Though substantially reduced from prior levels (and continuing to fall), China still holds $770 billion dollars’ worth of U.S. Treasury bonds (American debt notes). China exports in excess of $500 billion dollars’ worth of goods to America each year even with increasing sanctions (existing and promised). Chinese companies invest an average of more than $25 billion dollars annually in American businesses and business operations even with more and more States limiting what and where certain individual Chinese and Chinese companies can invest. In the non-economic sphere, China faces America globally everywhere it turns.

The state of America--politically, economically, socially, and militarily, is of GREAT importance to China--her government, economy, and continued ability to grow domestically and secure and defend her place in the wider world.

Would China prefer a return to Donald Trump and his bombastic, seat-of-the-pants, transactional approach to the world? Or would they prefer working with Kamala Harris and what is expected to be her general continuation of President Biden’s more measured, protocol- and ally-based diplomacy?

After all, it is not like either candidate and their respective political party are refraining from proclaiming hard lines against the Chinese Communist Party, government, military, and economy.

Spoiler Alert 1. China doesn't care who wins.

Why? Because “Who Does China Want to Win” is the wrong question. China may (or may not) in fact try to tip the scales, and if they do, their efforts may possibly even be in both directions. If so, however, it would be because engaging in such activity would be in line with the real question, which is what kind of America does China want or, rather, what kind of America benefits China?

Spoiler Alert 2. China wants an America that continues to be divided, rattled, distracted, off kilter, waffling, and fearful. To this end, the devil China knows is as useful as the devil China used to know. Particularly where the devils act a lot alike.

History is like a rollercoaster. Around and around, up and down, twisting and turning, nations trade places at the peaks and valleys of position, persuasion, and punch. The high points breed confidence. Confidence opens doors, creates opportunities, and leads to wealth and power. Power begets control. It is a heady perch. The converse of low points is also a truism. Confidence veers into arrogance and complacency, and hubris decays and destroys that which was enjoyed.

The highs and lows are relentless. A Cliff Notes recap of the last six centuries proves the point. Spain and Portugal were riding high with such confidence (and the benefits that came with it) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Netherlands joined the party in the seventeenth century. China acquired it in the eighteenth century and Britain in the nineteenth. For each, their time at the apex of global power and influence was historically fleeting as their coaster cart made the next drop and whipped around the next corner.

America assumed the mantle during the twentieth century. In this deepening twenty-first century, the unfolding years continue to offer strong hints that China, notwithstanding vicious headwinds, could be well-positioned to potentially re-assume and tame (again, for a while at best) the confidence label a flailing America appears intent on disgorging. Today, China is the largest trading partner of more than 120 countries, far more than the United States. China is gaining experience and influence in international bodies and is expanding around the world.

This alone is reason enough for America’s fear of a risen China. A divided America feels threatened--economically, militarily, politically, and socially. But this is not the sole reason, or at least it is not that simple.

And it begs a further question: Is America’s problem China, or is it America?

Countries think of themselves and their respective cultures as special, if not superior. America has been the strongest, most influential nation in the world for four plus generations. By now, Americans believe instinctively that this is the result of American culture, beliefs, and system. China’s rise over the past forty plus years has been sensational, and the Chinese believe viscerally that their re-emergence as an influential nation is bedrocked by Chinese culture, beliefs, and system.

In these three areas of culture, beliefs, and system, China and America could not possibly be more divergent, even if their respective desires for power and control are mirror images. Each has a deep-seated faith that its distinct take on life and governance are best for it, and sometimes in the case of China and almost always in America, for others as well.

The clash that results from the above is what sets the world on edge in 2024. And it is why the upcoming U.S. election could, and likely will, be so consequential no matter who prevails. The opaqueness of China and the very-public, raging culture war within America add kindling to the cauldron.

What does China want? It has everything and nothing to do with the United States.

China does not really care who will win in America (not that they have much of a choice no matter what they do) because from China’s perspective the outcome will be six-of-one-half-and-a-dozen-of-the-other in all the ways that most matter. Yes, there will be differences in presentation, philosophy, and certain actions based on which political party is victorious, but the trajectory of relations between the two nations will continue to be laced with underlying animosity and fragility.

Why?

Principally because America suffers from a sweeping national phobia. This fear is learned, reflexive, and gut-churning. It has been a staple of American life and society for the entire period that America has led the world order.

This specter is a deep-seated dread of communism. As an ideology. As a political system. As an economic construct. As a symbol. It is code word for something un-American, something horrible, and something threatening, even when most Americans do not understand the nature of what it is that strikes such terror. This is the one thing that transcends partisan politics on this side of the Pacific.

The idea that “communism” can effectively organize any society, let alone lead a country to potentially be more powerful and globally accepted than the United States, raises panic in the deepest hearts of Americans across all political spectrums. No matter whether China is labelled Marxist, Leninist, Communist, Socialist with Chinese Characteristics, State Capitalist or some combination of these, in America, China = Communist and Communist = Fear.

Professor Kerry Brown (Chinese Studies, Kings College, London) writes in China Incorporated: The Politics of a World Where China is Number One (2023) that America’s predilection to demonize China and paint the country with a broad brush, what he calls a “China delusion,” is problematic for three principal reasons:

It downplays the complexity of a situation that is the textbook definition of intricate and nuanced;
Seeing China in binary, either-or terms, leads Americans to “over-privilege [China’s] power in the world;” and
Oversimplifying China and thinking about a Cold War 2 based on the experience with the original Cold War hamstrings academics, policy makers, and others in responding to a resurgent China.

I believe that this demonization of China is also a subconscious (and occasionally conscious) manifestation of Americans’ gnawing fear that our internal divisions, acrimony, and instability are sapping what America once was, is or hopes to be.

In a 2023 speech at the University of Wisconsin, Kaiser Kuo (writer and host and co-founder of The Sinica Podcast) discussed how

“We’re not behaving like a confident superpower that still believes that upholding our values and institutions at home — our openness, our freedoms, our diversity, our rule of law, our democracy — will prevail, will appeal to and attract, and will ensure that we continue to innovate….“To far too many Americans, China is just an abstraction that we invest with either our fears and insecurities, or is painted in our minds as some techno-utopian fantasyland of hyper-modernity, where technocracy has triumphed….”

America’s problem with China, our seeming inability to appreciate in Kaiser Kuo’s words, the “dozens of fine shades of gray” in the bilateral relationship, is at its root a problem with America.

It begins with that dreaded communism and extends to the economic volatility that has exploded in global America since China was granted permanent Most Favored Nation status in 2000 and then joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. The American culture war did not begin because of or with China, but it has been on steroids ever since China became an integral part of American and world life.

Thus, to respond meaningfully to a resurgent China, Americans first need to find themselves. The question facing America is whether, in the words of Professor Akil Reed Amar, “America’s necessary ‘common core,’” its Constitution, will continue to effectively organize a religiously, racially, economically, culturally, and philosophically diverse America to remain together and prosper:

“‘The United States Constitution and its history are what We (with a capital W) have in common, and if We don’t like that document as is, We can amend it, as, indeed, previous generations of American have made amends and amendments. This terse text and the saga that underlies it are what makes us Americans. Without broad agreement on the constitutional basics—not every detail, but on the big picture, the main narrative—we are lost. We are Babel. We are not We. And if so, We may ultimately lose the Republic that [Benjamin] Franklin hoped we could keep.’”1

In today’s America, broad agreement on seeking longstanding ideals or on what these ideals should even mean has snapped. Divergent and angry opinions have solidified at both hardened ends of the political spectrum leaving a trapped and forlorn middle.

Confidence and empathy are in short supply; fear and paranoia (“they” are out to get “me”) are surging. Civics is a lost study; civil discourse a lost art. The separation of church and state is increasingly fractured. There is virtually no compromise. It all has become so personal.

If China is watching America, and they are, where does this state of America leave the Middle Kingdom? Again, what does China want?

China wants respect. China demands respect. China seeks flexibility and freedom to govern itself and its territory (a loaded term) without psychological, physical, economic, political or military influence or interference from anyone, most particularly from what they see as a sanctimonious West. Chinese security is a China able to live and operate as it sees fit. Everything China does is with this end goal in mind.

Xi Jinping (b. 1953) is the head coach and general manager of Team China. Since rising up the ranks and being elected as China’s leader in 2012, Xi has relentlessly promoted the idea of a united, strong, and prosperous China with unapologetic vigor. In doing so, he has re-packaged and re-interpreted a singular vision of China’s past that undergirds and amplifies his plan for China’s today and tomorrow.

Xi’s analysis is a complete 180 from Mao Zedong, who reviled China’s antiquity and sought to eliminate it. Xi holds that the correct understanding of China’s history, including the fallout from the so-called Century of National Humiliation following the Opium Wars in the mid nineteenth century and the rise of the Chinese Communist Party in the twentieth century, is key to China’s flourishing in the present and continued prospering in the future. Patriotic education, propaganda, and official media, as well as shrill and sweeping unofficial and quasi-official nationalist platforms, champion this story of China’s past greatness.

The messages are further designed to reinforce the Communist Party’s indispensability to achieving this narrative and to solidifying public support for the Party and its leadership of the nation. Though there are no guarantees and domestic warning signals are constantly blaring, Xi has reintroduced (with varying degrees of success) a renewed and updated emphasis on Mao’s theory of revolutionary drive to capture and harness the imaginations and productive potentials of the Chinese people and Chinese society.

China will pursue this course no matter who governs America, and there is nothing inherently wrong or unexpected about a nation advocating for its culture and beliefs and system as primary. The Chinese efforts in this regard, however, are a poignant counterpoint to what is arguably the principal shortcoming of modern America: the country is myopically, almost hedonistically, focused on the present.

A divided, rattled, and distracted America, an America that is off kilter, waffling, and fearful, this is the best America for China. This America gives China more latitude to expand and extend its influence, and thereby solidify its security and stability. The culture war, economic fragmentation, and political disharmony tearing America apart are gifts to China. Harris? Trump? Different sides of the same coin.

If politics is theater, then China and America produce plays of such distinct genres that the respective audiences more often than not are unable or unwilling to construe and appreciate the productions unfolding on stage. Some of this is by design; some by happenstance.

In America, the governance system is designed to take precedence over the players. In theory, if the ideals and general parameters of the U.S. Constitution are followed, the system will triumph in serving the purpose of government notwithstanding who leads. In China, this framework is reversed. The leaders believe that the system can and will only be successful in serving the purpose of government if they, the Communist Party, lead the system. Change the players and the system is threatened.

In China, political reality, the true policy heart of a matter, will almost never be communicated openly. It needs to be teased out of a tightly scripted screenplay. In such a system, specific words and phrases are revealing, even as they appear clunky and jargonistic to those outside the system. The written record of the Chinese government is replete with catchphrases and slogans based on euphemism, allusion, and allegory. The messages are indirect and winding. The system shuns the limelight and survives on public outcome.

In America, there seems to be little scripting or planning. In their place is unremitting, deadline-hitting, angina-inducing debate, bluster, and compromise that leaves almost no one satisfied. The American system has always mandated dialogue and persuasion leading to a middle ground. There was to be no fiat, no monarch, no aristocracy. The system was not designed to be quick and expedient. It was designed to be open and contentious. Tension on full display, the system is supposed to thrive on public process.

Wang Huning (b. 1955), the man known as China’s most powerful intellectual and “China’s Teacher,” is a longtime Chinese “America-watcher.” He is a member of the CCP Politburo Standing Committee and Executive Secretary of the Secretariat of the CCP Central Committee. Most significantly, he has the ear of Xi Jinping. He is virtually unknown in America.

Wang has written at length on America and the need for China to develop a new set of values to serve as the foundation of a new political culture to replace the old. He is an enthusiastic proponent of Marxism as the solution.

His early political thinking was influenced by a six-month visit to America in 1989. This trip led to his book entitled, America Against America (1991). Wang writes there how in his estimation,

“America had traded its soul—the connective tissues of community, tradition, and family—for the glory of national wealth and power. Strong but weak-spirited, individualistic but lonely, rich but decadent, America was…a paradox headed for disaster.”2

Wang’s writing is dense, but it is worthy of reading (and necessarily re-reading) to gain a better understanding of Xi’s China. Wang wrote the following in a lengthy, more recent essay:

“Human societies inevitably structure life so as to favor certain ways of coping with events and certain ways of measuring them, and people living in particular societies see their ways of solving problems as their basis for viewing the entire world….Chinese political culture has traditionally been ‘culturally oriented,’ which is different from Western political culture, which is ‘institutionally oriented.’ Culturally oriented refers to a political culture that is itself inextricably linked to family life, social life, moral life, and ethical life, so that political culture is diffused throughout the larger social culture. Society acts on political life through certain cultural mechanisms and the general subjectivity shaped by these cultural forms, so that the realization of political life is in fact the unfolding of social and ethical life….

“The institutional-political class [in the West] is defined mainly by its participation in the political process, that is, by their ‘actual participation in political life.’ In China’s cultural climate, however, the effectiveness and power of political culture comes from the public’s approval or disapproval, reaction or lack of reaction, or acceptance or lack of acceptance, instead of personal participation….Traditional Chinese political culture emphasizes character, ethics, personal cultivation, goodness, and morality, so there is no distinction between church and state, and politics and scholarship overlap. Western political culture emphasizes society, law and institutions, power, and constraints on power, thus separating church and state, politics and scholarship.”3

Does China want to lead the world, ala America? Let’s check in with a few thought-leaders.

Elizabeth Economy (political scientist) believes that Xi desires to be leader of an alternative world order, and she offers a proposed American response in the May/June 2024 issue of Foreign Affairs. Accepting that China is a complex work in progress, Economy writes that “…Xi’s vision is far more formidable than it seems. China’s proposals would give power to the many countries that have been frustrated and sidelined by the present order, but it would still afford the states Washington currently favors with valuable international roles….China is succeeding in making itself an agent of welcome change while portraying the United States as the defender of a status quo that few particularly like.” This leads to her proposed solution…“the United States must seize the mantle of change that China has claimed.”

There is a lot of meat in Economy’s analysis, though I do not believe that China wants to replace America as a global governance and military leader. Rather, China wants to foster an alternative world order with a China dominant enough to secure its desire and demand for respect, flexibility and freedom. If these can be achieved, then the rest of the world can go along its merry way. In this, it is executing a sophisticated playbook. America is on defense.

China and America see many (virtually all) things from divergent perspectives, cultures, and values. Professor Brown frames this as China coming from “cultural and intellectual traditions…structurally different to the Enlightenment West, ones which are hybrid, complicated and exclusive and excluding, and do not want to have universal pretensions.”4

Others look to the analogy of the West playing chess, while the Chinese are playing weiqi (Go in Japanese). “‘Chess is played in a structured space, with each piece assigned a specific role in the hierarchy with a clear differentiation between [the classes of pieces], each moving in its designated way. In contrast, weiqi is played in fluid space where the pieces are identical, and their roles are ambiguous….The strategic orchestration of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts….The ambiguousness and fluidity of their roles augment the potential importance of every piece on the board,….”5

Gish Jen (author) writes about the “East-West Culture Gap” in The Girl at the Baggage Claim (2017). In her analysis, China epitomizes the concept of an “interdependent flexi-self” and America exemplifies an “independent big-pit self.” The former is a collectivistic model that employs a “pattern-attuned perceptual filter” in life, while the latter is an individualistic model that evinces “confrontation and divergent thinking.”

The above analyses could and should provide a framework for critically reviewing and relating to the China them, us, and we. Unfortunately, this is where the nuance too often gets lost in today’s America.

A leading China hawk in the U.S. Congress said in a speech in late January, 2024, that “‘the opposite of communism is not capitalism. It is not democracy. It is faith in God’….‘Our long term ‘strategic competition’ with the Chinese Communist Party is not a test of different socio-economic systems. It is a struggle for souls.’” This throwback, proselytizing notion regarding China accords with those who believe China to be an existential threat to America.

Today, the one thing that most unites the American and Chinese governments is their mutual apprehension of the other. Each agonizes over the same question: What if the other’s system proves to be better or people around the world, including at home, believe that it is or can be?

This anxiety causes China to actively attempt to limit, manage, and massage what its citizens can read, know, and participate in, as well as stretches to the country’s messaging abroad. This anxiety causes America to hyperventilate at the drop of a hat. This anxiety destroys trust and breeds a paralysis that renders the ability to work together productively, civilly, and safely a harder and harder challenge.

The ultimate irony may be that America and China, as they are currently constituted, were each born out of similar circumstances and have followed broadly similar developmental paths (if not clearly to different places):

Today’s political America began in 1788 when the U.S. Constitution went into effect. America was then newly-freed from more than a century of colonization by Great Britain after fighting a brutal, multi-year war of revolutionary independence. The new government was an experiment, a novel form of political and societal organization at scale. In the subsequent centuries, America has prospered, battled demons, almost splintered in a civil war, struggled to adapt to external and internal changes, and transitioned through repeated stages of advance and decline.
Today’s political China began in 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party finally threw off (and out) a century of colonization by foreign powers and won a vicious civil war. Since then, as longtime China resident and observer Gordon Dumoulin has written, “China is a prolonged and dynamic societal and economic experiment….An ongoing film, replete with peaks and troughs marked by unprecedented achievements, excessive missteps, course corrections and deviations. But au fond with an overarching vision.”6

The dynamic between China and America is much deeper than one election, but each election is another cog in the wheel no matter who wins. The questions and consequences of the U.S.-China relationship are paramount to the futures of America, China, and the world in the twenty-first century.

Since the roller coaster cannot be stopped nor dismounted, both China and America need to recognize where they are, check that their seat belts are tight, hold on or wave their hands as they see fit, but always take care to not crash the cart.

Andrew’s China Newsletter

Andrew Singer Talks About China

Vol. 3, Issue 9

Beijing Wants Who in the U.S. Election?

Beijing Wants Who in the U.S. Election?

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