Shi Yinhong, "Future World Configuration"

Shi Yinhong, “The U.S. and Other Major Countries' Policies Toward China and the Future World Configuration”[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby

Introduction

Shi Yinhong (b. 1951) is a professor of International Relations, Chairman of Academic Committee of the School of International Studies, and Director of the Center on American Studies at Renmin University of China in Beijing.  Like most professors in international relations in top universities in China, Shi is fluent in English and has enjoyed numerous stints as Visiting Professor in the United States and Europe.  His Baidu profile includes an impressive list of his publications (which include many translations from English-language sources).

Shi in general writes as a liberal, which is clear from the titles of articles he published on the Guancha website last year (in Chinese)—“I Really Hate it when People say Trump is a Businessman,” and “There are Conflicts between the U.S. and China, but There is no Cause for Alarm”—and from an interview he did on the subject of Xi Jinping’s foreign policy with the Chinese-language New York Times in 2015.  The text translated here reminds me of an Axios post (indeed, we are told that the post contains 6300 characters and will take 16 minutes to read) in that it is a down-and-dirty, bullet-points version of the current state of the world as seen from the perspective of a leading Chinese scholar of international politics and Sino-U.S. relations.  This strikes me as valuable whether we agree with Shi’s assessment or not; to me it looks sober and serious.

The final paragraphs of Shi’s text are notable for their alarmist tone.  Clearly frightened by the rapid deterioration of the Sino-U.S. relationship, Shi calls for China to engage in immediate and substantial retrenchment efforts, particularly in the South China Sea, to avoid giving the Trump administration a pretext to further damage the relationship prior to Biden’s inauguration in mid-January 2021; Shi imagines that Trump might go so far as to jettison the long-standing U.S. commitment to the One China Policy, which would indeed heighten tensions to a level not seen in the post-normalization era.

Sinocism’s Bill Bishop notes, in reference to Shi’s text, that he does not think Shi has “much influence with the decision-makers in the Xi administration,” and I have no reason to disagree with Bill.  “What worries me,” Bishop continues, is that Shi is “seeing those decision-makers inside the Xi administration towards relishing engaging in the broader struggle with the US, believing that the pandemic has dramatically increased the convergence of relative power between China and the US and that the PRC has much more leverage to push back against the US as it pursues Xi's broader goals.”  Indeed.  In contrast to his 2019 piece on Guancha, Shi could well have entitled the present text “Now is High Time for Alarm.” 

Favorite Quotes

“In January 2020, China and the U.S. reached a phase one trade agreement, the important contents of which included a pledge that China would dramatically double its imports from the U.S. by $200 billion over two years, in exchange for the U.S. decision to eliminate high tariffs on $166 billion of Chinese exports to the U.S. and the U.S. decision to reduce by 50% the high tariff rate on another $122 billion of Chinese exports. This marked the first significant de-escalation in the U.S.-China trade war. However, the promise of a sharp increase in imports from the U.S. exceeds the actual needs of China's economy in the face of continued lower growth rates, potentially raises the "reference level" for continued U.S. selling to China beyond the two-year period, adds to the burden on China's dwindling foreign reserves, and very significantly reduces China's ability to make significant additional purchases from the rest of the developed world and several large developing countries, all of which increase China's diplomatic and strategic difficulties.”
 
“In addition, as direct result of current trends in global governance, China’s chances of filling the vacuum created by the Trump administration's abandonment of America's original "global leadership role" are limited, and indeed smaller than many at home and abroad had predicted. The appeal of China's "soft power" in the world, the resources and experience available to China, are quite limited, and the domestic and international obstacles that China will encounter, including the complexities created by the coronavirus pandemic, are considerable.”
 
“It must be affirmed that symmetric countermeasures are sometimes absolutely necessary, as when the United States was ordered to close the Consulate General in Chengdu in response to the closure of the Chinese Consulate General in Houston. At the same time, however, it must be understood that if we lack reciprocal capacity, we should not engage in symmetric countermeasures too often, to avoid the risk of exhausting our capacity, reducing our strategic and policy flexibility and our margin of maneuver, and weakening the understanding of and sympathy for China in international and world public opinion.  There is also a risk that such actions will lead Chinese public opinion, with its growing appetite for hawkishness, to exert greater pressure on government policy,  which may indeed be the sinister intent of the super-hawkish forces in the United States.”
 
“At present, China and the United States are strongly condemning one another from completely opposite positions and "moral high grounds," demanding important or fundamental concessions on a series of issues.  In particular, the Trump administration has announced that its goal is to remove the Chinese Communist Party from its ruling position in China, which means that it is impossible or to significantly ease the Sino-US confrontation or rivalry on one or two major issues, to say nothing of reversing the deteriorating trend in the overall stability of Sino-US relations. China and the United States should put an end to this situation, and China should take the initiative, on the basis of both countries’ shared basic interest in avoiding large-scale military conflict, to engage in dialogue or negotiations on “common denominator questions” or overarching issues in ways that are pragmatic, sufficiently focused, and are connected to concrete and important proposals, and should also see all possible compromises on smaller or inconsequential issues as secondary efforts that are subsidiary to the maintenance of the basic interests of the relationship.”
 
“China should resolutely, adequately, and persistently pursue strategic and military retrenchment, especially in the South China Sea, Taiwan, and the arms race, using this as a basic bargaining condition to prompt the new U.S. administration to sooner or later carry out a similar retrenchment, in order to mitigate the risk of a collision on the U.S.-China strategic frontier, promote a new strategic stability between China and the U.S., and seek to divide U.S. political attitudes toward China. From an overall perspective, it is important during a certain period of time not to antagonize developed countries other than the United States and Britain, or any large developing countries.   We must be resolutely patient with their efforts to oppose and exclude China in order to lend priority to a particularly important strategic focus in the present moment, which is to reduce the number of first- and second-tier rivals, to those who are neutral to us or who sympathize with us, and, in particular, to effectively maintain and develop relations with the European Union, ASEAN, and South Korea through sufficient and timely mutual compromise and concrete arrangements.”
 
Translation
 
The coronavirus epidemic has accelerated and complicated the once-in-a-century-change already underway. Against this backdrop, the policies of the United States and some other major countries toward China are quietly changing, the future world configuration is beginning to take shape, and there are many issues that are worthy of our attention and exploration.
 
U.S. Policy Trends Toward China
 
The pandemic’s impact on the entire world. At present, the historic super-hardline policy on China that the Trump administration launched in early 2018 is quietly losing steam on the strategic and economic fronts. On the strategic front, the situation is complex and sometimes even contradictory. On the one hand, the following U.S. activities have been reduced, dialed back, or even suspended due to the attack of the coronavirus pandemic: increased U.S.-Japan joint military operations against China in the East China Sea region; the construction of the Indo-Pacific Quadrilateral strategic alliance with Japan, Australia, and India; and strengthening strategic and military cooperation with the Taiwan authorities and arms sales to Taiwan. On the other hand, the United States is intensifying its military activities aimed at China: on March 25, May 13, June 4, August 18, and August 30, 2020, U.S. guided-missile destroyers crossed the Taiwan Strait; on March 27, 2020, they enacted the so-called "Taipei Act" to seriously escalate US "diplomatic" support for Taiwan; on June 9th, a U.S. Navy transport plane flew over the island of Taiwan in an act of rare provocation; on August 4, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar announced that, as part of the implementation of the "Taiwan Travel Act" of 2018, he would lead a delegation to Taiwan, the highest-ranking U.S. official and the only Cabinet Secretary to visit Taiwan since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China in 1979; the U.S. Navy conducted a high-profile live missile launch in the South China Sea near the Philippines; U.S. Navy warships conducted four "freedom of navigation" operations in the South China Sea from March to May, challenging China's claims of sovereignty, an act that was repeated again on July 14 and August 27; the frequency of U.S. military aircraft flyovers of the South China Sea has increased significantly, reaching 2,000 flights in the first half of 2020; two US aircraft carrier strike groups conducted exercises in the South China Sea from July 4 to 10, and again on July 17, which was the first time since 2014, and the second dual aircraft carrier strike group exercise in the South China Sea since 2001.
 
There is little doubt about a partial contraction on the economic and trade front. In January 2020, China and the U.S. reached a phase-one trade agreement, the important contents of which included a pledge that China would dramatically double its imports from the U.S. by $200 billion over two years, in exchange for the U.S. decision to eliminate high tariffs on $166 billion of Chinese exports to the U.S. and the U.S. decision to reduce by 50% the high tariff rate on another $122 billion of Chinese exports. This marked the first significant de-escalation in the U.S.-China trade war. However, the promise of a sharp increase in imports from the U.S. exceeds the actual needs of China's economy in the face of continued lower growth rates, potentially raises the "reference level" for continued U.S. selling to China beyond the two-year period, adds to the burden on China's dwindling foreign reserves, and very significantly reduces China's ability to make significant additional purchases from the rest of the developed world and several large developing countries, all of which increase China's diplomatic and strategic difficulties.
 
As for the second phase of the trade talks, hope has basically disappeared and the deal is out of reach.  Trump told the media on July 10 that relations with China have been "severely damaged" by China's coronavirus, which "could have been stopped, but wasn't," and that he no longer wants to sign a second trade deal. In Trump's view, China is neither able to fulfill its commitment to double imports from the U.S. as promised, nor is it willing to accept U.S. demands for substantial changes to its economic system and industrial policy, which means that trade talks have little practical significance and his administration will maintain its high tariff war indefinitely, continuing high tariffs on up to $372 billion of Chinese exports to the U.S. for an extended period of time.
 
On the political/ideological front with China, the Trump administration continues to block and repel China's "soft power" projection in the U.S. In early March 2020, it designated the official Chinese press agency in the U.S. as a "foreign mission" and expelled 60 of the 160 journalists working there.  More than three months later, four more official Chinese media outlets in the U.S. were designated as "foreign missions"; on August 13, the Confucius Institutes in the U.S. were similarly designated as "foreign missions," the purpose of which is to "use Chinese government funds to engage in Chinese Communist Party propaganda abroad.”
 
On June 24, in Arizona's state capital, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Robert O'Brien delivered a long, carefully crafted speech that elevated the Trump administration's political and ideological attacks on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to their highest level. In the speech, O'Brien claimed that Chinese Communist Party leaders are seeking ideological control beyond China's borders, are striving to "remake the world according to the way of thinking of the Communist Party," and have invested heavily over the past few years in overseas propaganda aimed at eliminating "unfriendly" Chinese media organizations throughout the world" and influencing English-language media channels. He charged that decades of U.S. efforts to persuade China to moderate and liberalize its Communist leadership system had backfired, resulting in "the greatest failure of U.S. foreign policy since the 1930s," until Trump reversed the bipartisan long-standing policy of accommodating China.
 
On July 14, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs David Starkey said in a speech in Washington, D.C., that "the new imperialistic behavior of the Chinese Communist Party is no accident, but an essential feature of the nationalist and Marxist-Leninist mentality.” This speech can be said to be a footnote to O'Brien's speech on the roots of China’s external behavior, and it also beat the drum for the “Pompeo Doctrine,” announced the preceding day, that China’s maritime claims in the South China Sea are “completely illegal.”  How similar this is George Kennan’s article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" (published under the pseudonym “Mr. X”)?  What the world is clearly hearing is the sound of the same ideological horn that trumpeted the origin of the Cold War.
 
On July 23, in a new high point in the Trump administration's ideological campaign of fierce and comprehensive criticism of the Chinese Communist Party, China's basic political and social system, and its foreign policy system, and in the most formal declaration of their reversal of the fundamental character of decades of U.S. policy toward China, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a sensational speech at the Nixon Library in California, declaring that "the old paradigm of blind engagement with China," which began with Nixon's 1972 visit to China, had failed.
 
"We must not continue it and we must not return to it," he said. "The truth is that our policies—and those of other free nations—resurrected China’s failing economy, only to see Beijing bite the international hands that were feeding it." " And if we don’t act now, ultimately the CCP will erode our freedoms and subvert the rules-based order that our societies have worked so hard to build. If we bend the knee now, our children’s children may be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party, whose actions are the primary challenge today in the free world." This definitely constitutes a declaration of a new Cold War.
 
Changes in some Countries' Policies toward China
 
There appears to be a relatively sharp potential estrangement between China and Russia. With the exception of April 16 and July 8, 2020, when the two heads of state exchanged phone calls and expressions of mutual support, for some six months there has been very little public contact, while such contact has been generally frequent, warm, and normal over the years. In stark contrast, Putin spoke with Trump four times in the two weeks beginning March 30 to discuss the possibility of cooperation between the United States and Russia in fighting the coronavirus epidemic and stabilizing the global energy market. On April 26, Putin and Trump issued a rare joint statement on the meeting of Soviet and U.S. forces at the Elbe River at the end of World War II as an example of how Russia and the United States can work together. It is worth noting that Russia is concerned about becoming too deeply involved in the rapidly intensifying U.S.-China rivalry and is eager to preserve or strengthen its foreign policy independence. Some “big thinkers” in the Russian foreign policy world have recently urged the Russian Federation government to advocate a “new stance of non-alignment” with regard to China and the United States, and try to lead “a community of nations unwilling to stand together to anyone seeking world or regional hegemony.”
 
At the urging of the United States, the Australian government actively coordinates its anti-China policy with the American stance. It took the lead in proposing an independent international investigation into the origin and spread of the coronavirus epidemic, and early on announced its participation in sanctions against the Hong Kong SAR under the Hong Kong National Security Act, and at roughly the same time announced an increase of nearly $200 billion in military spending over the next decade to strengthen its long-range naval and air forces against China in the South and Central Pacific.
 
India passed regulations in mid-April 2020 severely restricting China's direct investment in India. On June 15th, the most fierce Sino-Indian fighting in 45 years took place in the Kalwan Valley of Kashmir, resulting in a great increase in anti-China sentiment in India. The Modi government significantly increased forward troop deployments in Kashmir near the line of demarcation between India and China's de facto control, and in early September, Chinese and Indian troops clashed near Bangong Lake, where the first shots were fired between India and China in 45 years.
 
The Japanese government in general follows U.S. policy toward China on key issues. The recently concluded agreement between the United States and Japan to purchase 105 U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets from Japan is a major step toward increasing the joint U.S.-Japan strategic force advantage over China. Prime Minister Abe pledged in early March at a closed-door meeting of the “Future Investment Council,” which he chaired, to take measures to encourage Japanese companies to remove the manufacturing of high value-added products from China. The Japanese Diet has allocated $2.2 billion within the huge bailout appropriation for the coronavirus epidemic to finance the displacement of Japanese companies from China. On June 8, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Obe publicly stated that Japan was on the front lines of expressing "grave concern" about the enactment of Hong Kong's national security law. Two days later, Abe told the Diet that Japan wished to take the lead in pressing the G-7 to issue a joint statement on the situation in Hong Kong.

The actions of the current South Korean government since the outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic suggest that it is friendly to China, but it remains to be seen whether it can withstand U.S. cajoling and pressure. The Trump administration is in the planning stages in the construction of a "Network for Economic Prosperity" which would attempt to wean global supply chains away from China, and South Korea would be one of the key partners.
 
The major Western European countries are largely neutral on the U.S.-China rivalry, or we might say that some areas are closer to the U.S. and others closer to China. They follow the position of the American attacks on China on the most topical issues of world politics today, and share the view that the Chinese government has engaged in "cover-ups" and "falsification" its response to the epidemic, and they have similarly criticized China for enacting and implementing the "Law of the People's Republic of China on the Protection of the State of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region," and they also criticize China's position and policy on Xinjiang and in the South China Sea. The U.S. government has requested that its European allies “decouple" from China in the high-tech sector, a demand that has been more favorably received during the pandemic. UK Prime Minister Johnson has reportedly directed that plans be drawn up to reduce Huawei's involvement in the development of the UK's 5G network to zero by 2023.
 
In terms of the trend toward "decoupling" in the high-tech sector and the pattern of confrontation in the political and ideological spheres, the antagonism between the developed West as a whole and China is now clear and even relatively set in stone, even though the developed West is internally divided and largely lacking in "leadership." In early June, a group of parliamentarians from the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, Japan, Germany, Sweden, Norway, and the European Union formed an "Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China," claiming that in light of "global challenge represented by a China led by the Chinese Communist Party," alliance members should "stand together in a coordinated response to this major challenge.”
 
In addition, as direct result of current trends in global governance, China’s chances of filling the vacuum created by the Trump administration's abandonment of America's original "global leadership role" are limited, and indeed smaller than many at home and abroad had predicted. The appeal of China's "soft power" in the world, the resources and experience available to China, are quite limited, and the domestic and international obstacles that China will encounter, including the complexities created by the coronavirus pandemic, are considerable.
 
Development Trends in the Global Situation
 
The above-mentioned remarks by certain “big thinkers” in the Russian foreign policy world, together with well-known talks on the “world situation” by German Chancellor Merkel and French President Macron, and remarks such as those of the Indonesian Foreign Minister, who on September 8, 2020 noted clearly that Indonesia and the ASEAN countries “do not want to be dragged in the Sino-U.S. rivalry,” all point toward the ideological configuration of the future world, conditioned by considerations of power, interest, and mindset.  In the post-pandemic era that will arriver sooner or later, with the exception of a minority of “loyal followers” of either China or the U.S., the rest of the world will be forced to favor either the United States or China to varying degrees in consideration of their respective national interests. At the same time, they will strive to maintain or gain varying degrees of neutrality and policy independence, moving closer to the U.S. in some areas and closer to China in others. The global political economy and "psychological world" will split into two "tightly knit camps" and a very large "middle zone.” The "middle zone" will include certain large countries that individually carry less weight than the U.S. or China, but are nonetheless powerful, independent, and "strategic" enough that they can force the U.S. or China to make concessions in connection with their preferences on relevant issues and areas.
 
In the future world scenario just described, the two "tightly knit camps" already have their own well-defined and largely unchangeable ideological systems, and while the very large "middle zone" will include many countries with a wide variety of political and social systems and ideologies, points of ideological agreement, or perhaps clear ideological characteristics will gradually evolve, and will include: the idea that the world is multipolar, that the struggle for hegemony will be limited, that major world issues are diverse, that "leadership" will be differentiated by issue area, and that the countries of the middle zone will not enter into military alliances or full-scale partnerships (especially long-lasting strategic partnerships) with the superpowers. As French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on September 13, 2020, "The European Union must define its own interests and must be strong and independent--independent of China and the United States. This is crucial for success in the 21st century.” Perhaps it will be this "middle ground" rather than any superpower that will be the main trend in world politics in the future.
 
For this reason there is a major future possibility, which is that the global political and ideological environment will change, becoming less tolerant of hegemonic power politics, and more strongly in favor of the independence of the rights and policies of nation-states, and that egalitarian international public opinion will play a greater role. In a high-tech era, it is more difficult for any superpower to maintain an advantage in different functional areas.
 
How China Should Respond
 
Before the new U.S. president takes office on January 20, 2021, the Trump administration is highly likely to tighten its containment of China by increasing legal sanctions against China on issues such as Hong Kong and Xinjiang; intensifying "enforcement" actions against alleged Chinese espionage, infiltration, and subversion; continuing to exclude Chinese high-technology companies from operating in the U.S. and pressuring Germany and other countries to work with the U.S. to suppress Huawei's 5G and other Chinese high-tech developments; engaging in "freedom of navigation operations" in the South China Sea with high frequency and intensity to deny China's claims of sovereignty and maritime rights, and deploying massive advanced forces in the South China Sea to deter China; and continuing its broad-scale criticism of the basic system and foreign policy of the Chinese Communist Party. In addition, there is a growing likelihood that the Trump administration will undertake limited military strikes in the South China Sea against one or more of the islands where China has deployed its military forces, or that it will do unprecedented damage to, or even publicly abandon, its traditional "one-China" policy.
 
What should China do in the face of this dire situation? It must be affirmed that symmetric countermeasures are sometimes absolutely necessary, as when the United States was ordered to close the Consulate General in Chengdu in response to the closure of the Chinese Consulate General in Houston. At the same time, however, it must be understood that if we lack reciprocal capacity, we should not engage in symmetric countermeasures too often, to avoid the risk of exhausting our capacity, reducing our strategic and policy flexibility and our margin of maneuver, and weakening the understanding of and sympathy for China in international and world public opinion.  There is also a risk that such actions will lead Chinese public opinion, with its growing appetite for hawkishness, to exert greater pressure on government policy,  which may indeed be the sinister intent of the super-hawkish forces in the United States.
 
At present, China and the United States are strongly condemning one another from completely opposite positions and "moral high grounds," demanding important or fundamental concessions on a series of issues.  In particular, the Trump administration has announced that its goal is to remove the Chinese Communist Party from its ruling position in China, which means that it is impossible to significantly ease the Sino-US confrontation or rivalry on one or two major issues, to say nothing of reversing the deteriorating trend in the overall stability of Sino-US relations. China and the United States should put an end to this situation, and China should take the initiative, on the basis of both countries’ shared basic interest in avoiding large-scale military conflict, to engage in dialogue or negotiations on “common denominator questions” or overarching issues in ways that are pragmatic, sufficiently focused, and are connected to concrete and important proposals, and should also see all possible compromises on smaller or inconsequential issues as secondary efforts that are subsidiary to the maintenance of the basic interests of the relationship.
 
China should resolutely, adequately, and persistently pursue strategic and military retrenchment, especially in the South China Sea, Taiwan, and the arms race, using this as a basic bargaining condition to prompt the new U.S. administration to sooner or later carry out a similar retrenchment, in order to mitigate the risk of a collision on the U.S.-China strategic frontier, promote a new strategic stability between China and the U.S., and seek to divide U.S. political attitudes toward China. From an overall perspective, it is important for a certain period of time not to antagonize developed countries other than the United States and Britain, or any large developing countries.   We must be resolutely patient with their efforts to oppose and exclude China in order to lend priority to a particularly important strategic focus in the present moment, which is to reduce the number of first- and second-tier rivals, to those who are neutral to us or who sympathize with us, and, in particular, to effectively maintain and develop relations with the European Union, ASEAN, and South Korea through sufficient and timely mutual compromise and concrete arrangements.
 
Closely related to China's national direction, there are two mutually contradictory pictures of the basic situation in the hearts of millions of Chinese people: the "absolute picture" and the "relative picture.” The "absolute picture" refers to both the enormous economic and social costs of fighting the coronavirus epidemic on the domestic front, and the deterioration of the external economic and political environment, or the dramatic increase in external difficulties, caused by the global pandemic. As a result of these developments, China in general is significantly weaker than it was before the domestic outbreak of the coronavirus, and striving for rapid progress in economic recovery and preventing a recurrence of the epidemic on the basis of a major victory in the fight against the disease constitute our overwhelming top priorities.  This requires sufficient retrenchment, restraint, and parsimony in other national affairs. There is also, however, the "relative picture," which is that the domestic anti-epidemic, political and economic situation of the United States and its major allies is in worse shape than in China, and the trends in term of changes in the balance of power between China and the United States seem to be accelerating sharply. Consequently, China's peaceful rise has a new historical opportunity to make unprecedented military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological strides that are not only necessary but also feasible. These two divergent pictures will dominate Chinese policy for the long term, making things ever more complex.
 
[1] 时殷弘, “美国及其他主要国家对华政策与未来世界格局,” published online on November 17, 2020.