The United States vs. China - C. Fred Bergsten

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of the widespread nationalist and anti-American attitudes in China. It would greatly accelerate the country’s desire to succeed globally, and to supersede the United States specifically. It would dramatically dust off all the specters of “foreign exploitation” and reinforce the image of the “century of humiliation.” It should also never be forgotten that the United States containment policy against Japan in the late 1930s, especially its trade embargoes, was a trigger for Pearl Harbor and the Second World War (Copeland 2015). To mix metaphors, it would be a “Sputnik moment” for China.

      It is hard to imagine a more futile and more costly strategy for the United States. President Biden instructed his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, to emphasize in his first meeting with Chinese leaders in early 2021 that “Our goal is not to contain China, to hold it back, keep it down.” The Congressional ban on US cooperation with China in space, levied in 2011, illustrates the folly as China has become an independent space power and the United States cannot even obtain any of the specimens it will bring back from the moon.

      The early Biden Administration appeared to be moving in this direction. It shared much of the Trumpian concern over China’s intentions and various of its initiatives but would adopt a very different approach in response. Its foreign policy leadership, already before taking office, had conceptualized their intended policy toward China as falling into three baskets: one of confrontation (primarily over values, such as human rights), one of cooperation (such as climate change and pandemic responses), and one of competition (Campbell and Sullivan 2019, echoed in their early official statements, and Doshi 2021). A central theme of this book is that international economic topics, particularly those that relate to systemic maintenance and preservation, should be included in the “cooperation” basket to the maximum possible extent. Competition will ensue, and is compatible with cooperation, but confrontation over economic issues should be minimized.

      It would be far superior, from both a US and global perspective, to decouple the economic issues from the inherently contentious security and values issues, rather than to decouple China and the United States in any comprehensive manner. The United States and much of the world will continue to abhor China’s disregard for some of the basic human rights of its people – as with the Uighurs and Hong Kong – and its repressive political regime more broadly, as well as some of its military activities. But the United States and the rest of the world will also have to deal extensively with the world’s largest (and arguably most powerful) economy. Hence a functional rather than geographic decoupling is much to be preferred.

      The mix between competition and cooperation, within the trilogy, might change over time. China clearly feels that it needs to compete aggressively with the United States in the current catchup phase of its evolution toward global economic leadership. Once it has established its place in the first ranks, and especially once its size advantage enables it to influence global norms much more extensively and thus enhances its self-confidence, it may become more prone to cooperation (Yu and Zhang 2020). This is yet another reason for the United States to find ways to accept China into a global position commensurate with its capabilities and aspirations, in an effort to blunt its aggressive export of its preferences and speed the day when cooperation will become reciprocal and hence effective. Alternatively, China’s economy may falter as its population ages and its politics prevent meaningful reform, so it may have to pare back its international ambitions.

      The United States and its allies should thus adopt a strategy of conditional competitive cooperation. Engagement encompassed the “cooperation” part of such an approach but never insisted on full reciprocity, making it unviable in US domestic politics. Engagement did not place sufficient priority on working with China systemically to forge new cooperative arrangements for global leadership, nor did it recognize China as an equal partner in exercising such leadership, making it unviable in Chinese domestic politics. The United States called on China to become a “responsible stakeholder” but in practice opposed its efforts to do so outside the US umbrella, as with the AIIB and BRI. Any new strategy that derived from the perspective of the competition for global economic leadership would have to rest on such an approach.

      Acceptance by the United States of China’s legitimate leadership aspirations would have to be conditioned on fully reciprocal behavior by China. Provision of equal voting rights at the IMF, for example, would be contingent on Chinese commitments to binding constraints on currency manipulation and provision of fully transparent data. Extension of market economy status in the WTO could ensue only if China accepted binding disciplines on subsidies to SOEs, protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) and prohibition of forced technology transfers. US participation in such China-led ventures as the AIIB and BRI could be matched by Chinese participation in Western institutions such as the International Energy Agency (IEA) (and maybe the full OECD) and the Paris Club of creditor countries. Domestic political realities in both countries require that true systemic cooperation would have to be premised on resolution of America’s grievances over China’s economic policies, and of China’s grievances over its inadequate role in the global governance system.

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