If you want to solve a problem, it helps to be able to define it, but when it comes to a problem like China, western leaders have been struggling to find the right words. How West struggles to define relationship with Beijing?
Liz Truss sought to designate China as a “threat” to Britain, but did not stay prime minister long enough for that to become established policy. Her successor, Rishi Sunak, has opted for the less combative “systemic challenge” but he is under pressure from backbench MPs to follow Truss’s path and call Beijing a “strategic threat”.
Sunak has made clear he does not want the UK to be out of step with its allies on the issue, most importantly the US. In Washington, meanwhile, China designation is a delicate and evolving art.
The delicacy was apparent when a Chinese balloon sailed over the continental US earlier this month. The US declared the high-altitude airship and its payload to be designed for spying and shot it down once it was safely over the Atlantic. The secretary of state, Antony Blinken, cancelled a long-planned trip to Beijing to address bilateral tensions, but at the same time stressed that channels of communication would be kept open and that the US remained keen on a meeting when conditions allowed. Blinken may meet his counterpart, Wang Yi, as soon as this week, at the Munich security conference.
The theme of US-China policy towards the end of the Trump administration was an all-encompassing decoupling, in which China was presented in mostly adversarial terms. Joe Biden has preferred to talk about “stiff competition”.
His administration’s national defence strategy paper deemed Russia to be an “acute threat” while China was portrayed as the US’s only long-term “competitor”. In recent weeks, the official catchphrase for Beijing has been the slightly nebulous “pacing challenge”, suggesting the US is the world’s constant frontrunner with China ever closer to its shoulder.
The problem with categorising China is that there are multiple aspects to its global role as it expands its presence on the world stage. For that reason, Democratic senator Chris Murphy has warned against digging up old cold war rhetoric.
“You can’t use the terminology that we used for our conflict with the Soviet Union for our conflict with China,” Murphy told Foreign Policy. “It is apples and oranges. We had virtually no trade relationship with the Soviet Union. Our most vital trade relationship is with China.
“So I do worry about a bunch of cold warriors and cold war enthusiasts thinking that you can run a competition with China like you ran a competition with the Soviet Union. It’s not the same thing.”
With this in mind, Blinken has adopted a Swiss-army-penknife, multi-tooled approach that is “competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be and adversarial when it must be”.
Washington is acutely aware that it has been complacent in its competition with China for global clout, having assumed that better US technology and its democratic model would win the day, only to find that African countries and other parts of the global south were sitting on their hands when the US called for support in the UN general assembly. Last year an old Pacific ally, Solomon Islands, signed a security pact with Beijing, denying entry to a US Coast Guard cutter not long after.
