Watching and listening to President Biden at his press conference in Vietnam, I was struck by how the president and the press who cover him have entirely the wrong mental construct about China. At a time when China is exploiting the weaknesses of America’s computers, sending spy balloons over sensitive U.S. military installations, and planting malware in our critical infrastructure that we cannot eliminate, all according to mainstream media reports, how can anyone talk about “stabilizing” the U.S.-China relationship? China’s Xi Jinping is trying to establish a new world order with China at the center of it and that means subverting democracies around the world. He has nothing but contempt for the world order that the Americans and their allies have created.
Another key phrase one hears in this discussion is: “getting relations back on track.” Again, how can believe that we can return to some sort of status quo ante if Xi Jinping is determined to overturn the world order? That’s what he meant when he told Putin in Moscow that “what we’re doing hasn’t been done in 100 years,” or words to that effect. He was referring to the end of the tsars and the fall of China’s Ching dynasty.
Here are some quotes from President Biden that further show his confusion: “I don’t want to contain China. I just want to make sure that we have a relationship that is on the up and up, squared away, everybody knows what it’s all about.”
Up and up? Squared away? How can that possibly be if Xi is playing by a completely different set of rules–his own rules?
Here’s another: “It’s not about isolating China. It’s about making sure the rules of the road–everything from air space and — space and in the ocean is –the international rules of the road are….are…abided by.”
Firstly, there is no way to “isolate” China. It is a world power. But the key phrase Biden repeats, “the international rules of the road,” is revealing. (The rules come from the WTO, UN, IMF, WorldBank, etc.) Biden thinks that somehow he can persuade Xi to follow the international rules of the road. From a Chinese perspective, these “rules of the road” were written by the Americans and our allies. I’ve had Chinese tell me that these rules of the road were drafted specifically to hold China back. Xi Jinping hasn’t the slightest interest in following these rules.
Lastly, many media outlets are overplaying the economic challenges that Xi faces at home. One is youth unemployment. Xi flat out doesn’t care about that. He has publicly told young people to “eat bitterness” as he did as a young man. The real estate crisis is held up as another major crisis and, to be sure, it’s a problem. But none of these economic challenges will deter Xi from pursuing his Marxist-Leninist policies of Communist Party control. He has created an authoritarian party-state that is sitting on $3 trillion in reported foreign exchange reserves and perhaps another unreported $3 trillion lodged in state-owned banks. Xi possesses enormous power and ambition. To suggest that Xi is so pre-occupied by these economic internal problems that he cannot go to international meetings or meet the American president, as Biden suggested, is highly debatable. Biden and many in the media keep applying American values and American standards in attempting to assess what’s happening–what they haven’t been able to grasp is that these American values and standards are out of date. Xi Jinping’s ascendancy over the past decade has changed the entire equation of U.S.-China relations, as co-author Michael McLaughlin and I document in Battlefield Cyber: How China and Russia Are Undermining Our Democracy and National Security.”
