Xie Tao, "2020"

 
Xie Tao, “2020:  Sino-American Relations and U.S. Politics in the Time of the Pandemic”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Xie Tao is professor and dean of the School of International Relations and Diplomacy at Beijing Foreign Studies University.  He is a younger scholar than many translated on the site; he graduated from university in 1996, which means that he is probably in his mid- to late-40s.  He did his Ph.D. at Northwestern University in the United States, and publishes extensively in both Chinese and English (click here for a sample of his writings in English).  My impression is that his is a moderate voice that attempts to explain China to Americans and Americans to China in the hopes of improving Sino-American relations, at least at the present juncture. 
 
The text translated here makes no pretention to offer unique insights or scholarly understanding of the topic at hand, but is simply a well-known public intellectual’s reflections on the state of Sino-American relations in the wake of the ongoing pandemic and Joe Biden’s election.  It was published on February 28, 2021, in Exploration and Free Views 探索与争鸣, a respected forum via which many establishment intellectuals address the educated Chinese public.  Xie’s presentation of American foreign policy strikes me as par for the course in China (and elsewhere); although not everyone uses the world “hegemony,” I think much of the world largely shares his critical view, although there are certainly exceptions.  He reminds his readers that “America First” did not start with Trump, and presumably will not end with him either.  His depiction of the recent downturn in Sino-American relations is also in line with much Chinese commentary (for examples on this site, see here, here, and here, among others), blaming changes in fundamental American policy standpoints, rather than Chinese missteps, for the direction things have taken.
 
The final paragraphs are perhaps more interesting, as Xie warns against populism by illustrating how Trump and the Republicans used identity politics to mobilize the resentment of the poor and the working class, who subsequently voted against their own economic interests.  From this observations, he pivots to another:  that images of other countries are similarly constructed by elites with selfish interests, suggesting that both the Chinese and American people may well being played.  He calls on the elite of both countries to cease and desist in the interests of peace and prosperity.   
 
Favorite Quotes
 
“Even without the negative impact of Trump's re-election campaign or the pandemic, Sino-American relations would still have hit a low point due to other factors, especially the significant changes in U.S. national identity and the changes in the relative power positions of the United States and China.  We might describe U.S. national identity as ‘democracy first, white people first, and America first,’ and another word for ‘America first’ is hegemony.  Whether is was Time magazine founder Henry Luce’s ‘American Century’ from 1941, or Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s ‘American Pacific Century’ in 2011, or Joe Biden’s ‘Why America Should Lead the World Again’ from his presidential campaign, all reflect the hegemonic attitude that America is the only power.”
 
“Even if Trump is no longer in office, the arrival of the Biden administration does not mean that there will be a genuine positive turn in Sino-American relations in the short term.  As long as America’s hegemonic posture does not change, as long as America’s relative power continues to decline, as long as China maintains its current rate of growth, and as long as there is no resolution to the ideological differences between the two countries, Sino-American relations will remain in an extended period of high-level instability—even if, as Biden says, the United States will cooperate with China when such cooperation suits America’s own interests.  The 2020 election is over, and the pandemic looks to be nearing its end, but the strategic competition between China and the United States is just beginning.  In other words, the election and the pandemic were random events; the competition between China and the U.S. is a necessary event.  For policy-makers in both countries, the biggest challenge is to avoid situations where competition leads to catastrophe.”
 
“All politics are constructed.  The Republican elite used identity politics to make the Democrats out to be a threat and on this basis successfully mobilized their voters.  Similarly, the American national identity—What is America? Who is an American?—is also the result of elite construction generation after generation…Extending this reflection to the question of Sino-American relations, China is an important cooperative partner for American, and whether China is a strategic competitor with which America can peacefully co-exist or rather an existential threat, is to a great degree the result of decisions made by the political elite in both countries.  For this reason, whether the two countries can build a new great power relation without attacks and antagonism, and with mutual respect and cooperation for the common good, may well be decided by how the elites in each country choose to depict the other, which is more important then economic exchange, cultural exchange, and high-level dialogue.”
 
Links to other texts on this site
 
Click here for texts related to the theme of Donald Trump.
 
Click here for texts related to the theme of the coronavirus pandemic.
 
Click here for texts related to the theme of Sino-American relations.
 
Translation
 
I would never have believed that, after an entire year, the coronavirus pandemic is still ongoing.
 
I remember in January 2020 making plans with family members concerning how to spend the Spring Festival holiday, and we first decided to go to Australia.  Unexpectedly, however, too many people had applied for visas and there was no way to get them on time, so we had to drop the idea.  A friend of mine who applied earlier and got his visa went to Australia with his children, but because of the pandemic he remains stuck in Melbourne even now.  We decided that since Australia was out, we would go to Quanzhou, the origin of the historical maritime silk road, and we made our reservations, but had to cancel everything because the virus hit before the end of the month.  The virus returned in a few areas before this year’s Spring Festival, meaning that all sorts of places rolled out strict virus control measures, so we decided to pass the New Year in Beijing yet again.
 
I did not experience the SARS outbreak in 2003—I was studying abroad at the time—so this coronavirus pandemic is the first important public health incident that I have ever lived through.  As the epidemic spread throughout the world, it rapidly became a once-in-a-century global health crisis, not only seriously impacting the daily lives of a billion people, but also having an immense influence on international and domestic politics.  If the year 2020 was a play, then the coronavirus was the main actor.
 
When Sino-American Relations Encountered the Epidemic
 
No one could have predicted that Sino-American relations would be the first great victim of the pandemic.  The trade war that the Trump administration launched against China in July of 2018 caused a serious deterioration in Sino-American relations, but when the two sides signed the phase-one trade agreement on January 15, 2020, prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus, many people thought that the worst was over.  But after the outbreak of the virus, first, Trump, some members of his administration, and some Congressmen began to use the outbreak for their own purposes, and later when the pandemic began to hit the United States hard, the Trump administration, failing in its efforts to control the virus, frequently pointed the finger at China. 
 
2020 was also an election year in the United States, and the combination of the pandemic and the election led Sino-American relations to deteriorate to their worst point since the re-establishment of relations in 1978.  However, even without the negative impact of Trump's re-election campaign or the pandemic, Sino-American relations would still have hit a low point due to other factors, especially the significant changes in U.S. national identity and the changes in the relative power positions of the United States and China.  We might describe U.S. national identity as “democracy first, white people first, and America first,” and another word for “America first” is hegemony.  Whether is was Time magazine founder Henry Luce’s “American Century” from 1941, or Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s “American Pacific Century” in 2011, or Joe Biden’s “Why America Should Lead the World Again” from his presidential campaign, all reflect the hegemonic attitude that America is the only power.


In terms of practical diplomacy, this hegemonic attitude employs all measures necessary to keep any country from challenging or threatening America’s hegemonic position.  Since reform and opening, China’s overall national strength has expanded rapidly, and especially since the financial crisis in 2008, America’s relative strength has clearly declined, and for this reason it is hardly surprising that the ever stronger China would be seen as America’s main strategic competitor.  In fact, from the beginning of the Obama administration, U.S. China policy exhibited clear changes, as evidenced by the “Asia-Pacific rebalancing,” and already by 2015 there were American scholars warning that the relationship had reached a tipping point.  Even more important is that, due to profound differences in the political systems of the two countries, China came to be seen not only as America’s main strategic competitor, but also as an existential threat to the American way of life, which meant that America had to respond with its “entire society” and its “entire government.” 

Driven by this kind of thinking, China policy during the latter period of the Trump administration was very much like American policy toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War, displaying an extremely paranoid style, and imagining China as an omnipresent threat.  They proceeded to block Chinese high-tech companies, limit cultural exchange, close the Chinese consulate in Houston, launch investigations into Chinese scholars and American scholars who had immigrated from China, and force listed Chinese companies off of American stock markets.
 
Even if Trump is no longer in office, the arrival of the Biden administration does not mean that there will be a genuine positive turn in Sino-American relations in the short term.  As long as America’s hegemonic posture does not change, as long as America’s relative power continues to decline, as long as China maintains its current rate of growth, and as long as there is no resolution to the ideological differences between the two countries, Sino-American relations will remain in an extended period of high-level instability—even if, as Biden says, the United States will cooperate with China when such cooperation suits America’s own interests.  The 2020 election is over, and the pandemic looks to be nearing its end, but the strategic competition between China and the United States is just beginning.  In other words, the election and the pandemic were random events; the competition between China and the U.S. is a necessary event.  For policy-makers in both countries, the biggest challenge is to avoid situations where competition leads to catastrophe.
 
Looking at the American Political Ecology from the Perspective of the Pandemic
 
The pandemic struck American in the lead-up to the 2020 elections.  For this reason, the two big things occurring in the U.S. in 2020 were the pandemic and the election. 
 
The direct impact of the pandemic on the election was basically felt on two fronts.  One is that the lockdowns and other control measures were a huge blow to the American economy, and the unemployment rate rose to as high as 14.7% in April, the worst since the Great Depression of 1929.  Macroeconomic trends are one of the most important factors influencing elections, and generally speaking, the better the macroeconomic trends are in an election year, the more chances the ruling party has of being reelected, and the worse these trends are, the more likely it is that the ruling party will lose.   
 
The second was that to limit the risk of infection in the voting process, almost every state allowed voter registration (which is required if you want to vote) and actual voting by mail, thus making it much easier to vote and resulting in increased voter turn-out:  66.7% of voters with the right to vote did so, setting a 120-year record.  Because the difficulties in voting (lack of time or willingness to vote or register) are more pronounced for voters in the lower social and economic classes (such as ethnic minorities and the working class), the greater ease of voting brought about by the pandemic led to an important increase in participation among these groups, many of whom supported the Democrats.
 
Both of these factors were quite bad for Trump, meaning that the pandemic was a random event contributing to his loss.  We should note that he is the first sitting president since 1992 not to win reelection.  But his loss does not mean that the 74 year-old Trump will retire from battle and abandon politics.  Quite the contrary.  Ever since the end of the election he has insisted that there was large-scale cheating in the mail-in ballots, and for this reason refused to concede the election.  He also used all sorts of measures in an attempt to alter the results of the election.
 
Clearly, part of Trump’s charisma comes from his reality-show style of governing, with his self-promotion, his “telling it like it is,” and his government via Twitter.  Yet to maintain a strong and lasting attraction for voters, more than this is necessary.  In their 2020 book Let Them Eat Tweets, two American scholars, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, carried out a detailed study of the Republican party’s electoral strategy.  They argue that in periods when the gap between rich and poor is particularly serious (as in today’s United States), the Republican Party, which represents the interests of the wealthy, often uses non-economic issues to mobilize the electorate, and among all non-economic issues, that of identity politics (such as race, religion, and immigration) achieves the greatest results in terms of mobilization, because such issues speak to certain groups’ senses of loyalty and threat.  The authors point out mobilization relies on intensity, and intensity often is decided by feeling threatened:  “When there is a threat, people react.”  They argue that the Republicans used the two magic tricks of resentment and racialization to increase the electorate’s sense of threat, and mobilized them in this way. 
 
Looking back at Trump’s election and campaign and his strategy of governing fully confirms their analysis:  posing as the representative of the struggling working class, Trump raised the banners of anti-system, anti-political correctness, and anti-illegal immigration, enflaming his followers’ hatred of the Democrats, and used a discourse of crime, law and order, and welfare to racialize social issues.  In sum, according to the work of these two scholars, in eras of plutocracy, exploiting identity politics is the best strategy for the Republicans, who represent the interests of the wealthy minority, to win the votes of a large number of working Americans.
 
A Chinese expression to describe this strategy is “helping someone count the money after he has sold you out 被人卖了还帮人数钱.”  The point was made especially clear by the pandemic.  Trump supporters were adamantly opposed to lockdowns and social distancing, and carried out large demonstrations against such measures in many states.  To summarize the reason behind these demonstrations, they were essentially saying “Give me liberty or give me Covid.”  But the liberty they were talking about was not political liberty, but the economic liberty to go to work and make money to support their families.  In other words, they used their political liberty to seize economic liberty, the price for which was perhaps to catch Covid or even die.  The rich, however, would not risk poverty and perhaps hunger because of temporary control measures, which meant that the groups who were the most against such measures were the ordinary working classes, those who suffered most at the hands of the tax-cutting Trump administration. In terms of their economic interests, these groups should have supported the Democrats, but were “tricked” by the mobilization strategy of the Republicans, and supported Trump without hesitation 
 
All politics are constructed.  The Republican elite used identity politics to make the Democrats out to be a threat and on this basis successfully mobilized their voters.  Similarly, the American national identity—What is America? Who is an American?—is also the result of elite construction generation after generation. 

Extending this reflection to the question of Sino-American relations, China is an important cooperative partner for American, and whether China is a strategic competitor with which America can peacefully co-exist or rather an existential threat, is to a great degree the result of decisions made by the political elite in both countries.  For this reason, whether the two countries can build a new great power relation without attacks and antagonism, and with mutual respect and cooperation for the common good, may well be decided by how the elites in each country choose to depict the other, which is more important then economic exchange, cultural exchange, and high-level dialogue.

Notes 

[1] 谢韬, “2020：疫情下的中美关系与美国政治,” published online on Feb 28, 2021.