The Economist - USA (2020-08-01)

20 United States The EconomistAugust 1st 2020

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dren’s children may be at the mercy of the

Chinese Communist Party.”

Unnamed in these speeches—but an

unavoidable backdrop to them—are Joe Bi-

den and the presidential campaign. Mr

Trump’s campaign wants to portray the

presumptive Democratic nominee as soft

on China, suggesting Mr Biden while vice-

president underestimated the threat. A se-

nior administration official says that part

of the calculus driving recent actions is to

set China-usrelations on a trajectory that

would be difficult to reverse no matter who

wins in November. Some officials believe

they have come close to achieving this,

with the help of a broadly hawkish biparti-

san consensus in Congress, which has

passed tough legislation in response to the

treatment of Uighurs and Hong Kong. The

Communist Party’s own actions—turning

Xinjiang into a gulag and stripping Hong

Kong of the rule of law—have almost cer-

tainly ensured that America cannot return

fully to its former relationship with China.

Still, some hawks outside the adminis-

tration, including a few who say they will

vote for Mr Biden, worry that he would be

less confrontational with Mr Xi as he

searches for co-operation on issues like cli-

mate change and nuclear-arms control.

Many of his foreign-policy advisers are, in-

evitably, veterans of the Obama adminis-

tration. Hawks deride it as having accom-

modated China’s rise too readily for the

sake of, say, the Paris Agreement. Would a

Biden administration be softer, too?

No more Mr Soft Guy

Mr Biden’s advisers push back in a few

ways. First, they argue that he would re-

store moral authority by calling out China

for human-rights abuses. Second, they say

he intends to work with allies to press Chi-

na to change its behaviour. Third, he would

invest at home to make America a stronger

competitor in areas like 5g. Mr Trump, they

contend, has weakened America’s standing

relative to China on all three fronts: giving

a green light to human-rights abuses; un-

dermining allies while cosying up to dicta-

tors; and letting America’s institutions and

infrastructure rot. “We’re weaker and Chi-

na’s stronger because of President Trump,”

says Tony Blinken, an adviser to Mr Biden.

Mr Trump’s officials lay stress on their

actions, not the president’s words. Before

July’s salvos officials had moved to cut off

the supply of American technology to Hua-

wei, part of a campaign against the tele-

coms giant that has won some support

among allies: Britain has now said it will

bar Huawei from its networks (Australia

did so before America). The fbihas taken a

more aggressive approach to investigating

Chinese espionage—in his speech on Chi-

na, Mr Wray said he was opening a new case

every ten hours. The State Department re-

cently decided to cancel the visas of as

many as 3,000 graduate students connect-

ed to military institutions in China, the lat-

est uptick in scrutiny of Chinese nationals

coming to America for study or research.

And the Department of Defence has be-

come more assertive in conducting free-

dom-of-navigation operations in the South

China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.

Most provocative, perhaps, have been

shows of support for Tsai Ing-wen, the

president of Taiwan, which China claims as

its own. This has raised the question of

how far they might go in testing one of the

most delicate aspects of Sino-American re-

lations. A senior official says that after de-

cades of risk-averse diplomacy, the admin-

istration is determined to impose costs for

China’s behaviour.

Mr Biden’s advisers are on weak ground

when they claim the Obama administra-

tion was tough on China. A more persua-

sive argument is that, though he has sur-

rounded himself with China hawks, Mr

Trump is no hawk himself, and could un-

dercut his administration’s policies at a

stroke. He admitted, in an interview in

June, that he delayed imposing sanctions

on Chinese officials over Xinjiang because

he did not want to jeopardise a trade deal.

And the policy he is keenest on, tariffs, has

been a failure, netting a flimsy agreement

from China to buy more farm goods (which

Mr Bolton says the president asked Mr Xi to

do to help him win re-election).

Voters seem unimpressed. In a poll con-

ducted by Suffolk University and usaToday

in late June, 51% of respondents said Mr Bi-

den would do a better job of handling Chi-

na, compared with 41% for Mr Trump.

Might the president be willing to take

more radical measures against China,

egged on by the hawks around him? Ideas

which staffers have considered recently in-

clude a ban on all 92m Communist Party

members and their families visiting Amer-

ica, or sanctions on Chinese banks in Hong

Kong. These may be too provocative for Mr

Trump now—but could perhaps seem less

so as the election approaches.

In China, officials have so far responded

with relative restraint. They can read polls

too, and may want to see if the current tra-

jectory of relations continues after January.

Some propagandists have suggested they

would like Mr Trump to win, on the argu-

ment, like Mr Blinken’s, that he has weak-

ened America’s strategic position and

strengthened theirs. That may be bluster.

Or they may also view Mr Biden as someone

who would back up tough talk on issues

like human rights, rather than turn matters

of principle into bargaining chips. On that

score even hawks who are wary of Mr Biden

do not doubt his sincerity. China has

changed since he was vice-president, as

has the elite consensus in Washington. It

will take more than an election to end the

dark new era in us-China relations. 7

“S

o can we all agree that this #antitrust-

hearing has...nothing to do with anti-

trust?” The tweet, sent midway through the

five-hour congressional grilling on July

29th of the bosses of Alphabet (Google’s

parent), Amazon, Apple and Facebook, was

only a slight exaggeration. The much-

hyped, mostly virtual event will not do a lot

to move forward the debate about what, if

anything, to do to rein in the titans of tech.

Instead it was yet more proof that in the

current hyper-partisan environment such

hearings have become a bit of a farce.

In advance, aides to the antitrust sub-

committee of the House Judiciary Commit-

tee, which held the hearing, suggested that

the bosses would be confronted with plen-

ty of smoking guns. In 13 months of investi-

gation of big tech firms, intended to pro-

vide the basis for proposals on how to

reform America’s antitrust law, it collected

hundreds of hours of interviews and wad-

ed through 1.3m documents, mostly

emails. Yet if there was smoke, it was thin.

The most damning emails came from

Facebook, which many accuse of having

systematically taken over other social-me-

dia firms, such as Instagram and Whats-

App, to prevent them from becoming seri-

ous competitors. “One thing about startups

though is you can often acquire them. I

think this is a good outcome for everyone,”

the firm’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote

SAN FRANCISCO

Five hours of questioning with a

predictable outcome

Tech titans testify

Hearing without

listening

Zuckerberg dilutes the damage