18 The Economist July 17th 2021
BriefingAmerica’s China policy
A
merica mustfocus on “blunting Chi
nese power and order and building the
foundations for uspower and order”. That,
at least, is the message of a recent book by
Rush Doshi, until recently a scholar at the
Brookings Institution, a thinktank in
Washington, dc. “The Long Game: China’s
Grand Strategy to Displace American Or
der” argues that China has worked for
years to undermine America’s geopolitical
dominance and shape a more illiberal
world order that better protects and serves
China’s interests. It concludes that these
efforts need to be repaid in kind.
This is a striking rebuke to decades of
American foreignpolicy thinking focused
on “engagement” with China. The rebuke
gains extra weight from the fact that Mr
Doshi is now a China director on President
Joe Biden’s National Security Council,
where he works under Kurt Campbell, his
mentor and a leading architect of the ad
ministration’s China strategy.
Engagement was already on its uppers.
Donald Trump had replaced it with something more belligerent and capricious.
Many hoped that Mr Biden would bring
some order to the chaos and lay down rules
for a return to some sort of engagement, al
beit on less friendly terms than those prac
tised by the Obama administration in
which he served. But although Mr Biden’s
administration is indeed forgoing the ca
price and wilfulness of his predecessor, in
other respects it is toughening policy, as
siduously building a strategic framework
for countering and checking China’s rise.
Unlike Mr Trump, Mr Biden seems sin
cerely worried about a world in which Chi
na’s authoritarian model wins. That makes
him more serious about the policies im
plemented, often haphazardly, by the
hawks who served in the previous admin
istration. In its first six months Mr Biden’s
administration has, to the surprise of ma
ny, officially affirmed the label of “geno
cide” applied by the last administration to
atrocities in Xinjiang, and also worked
with allies to impose further sanctions on
the perpetrators. It has kept in place and refined Mr Trump’s prohibitions on doing
business with Huawei and a long list of
technology companies and militaryaffili
ated businesses. It has made countering
China a priority in talks with allies around
the world, and shown no urgency to hold a
summit with Xi Jinping, China’s president.
Mr Biden is positioning America as the
West’s leader in a “contest with autocrats”,
as he put it at the g7summit in June. In an
interview with The Economista senior ad
ministration official said China sees the
next 10 to 15 years as a window of opportu
nity in which to “assert its authority glob
ally”: continuing its attempts to dominate
critical technologies and rewrite the rules
of the global order, and cowing its critics so
as to make the world safe for autocracy.
This is not a secret. Mr Xi has outlined Chi
na’s ambitions to exert influence on the
global order, seizing a moment when the
Communist Party views the West to be in
decline. Even so, people in the West, the of
ficial said, are only beginning to recognise
“that we’re dealing with a country that is
perhaps less interested in coexistence, and
more interested in dominance”. The time
to take a stand, therefore, is now.Build then blunt
Defining the relationship as one of two an
tagonists with antithetical values makes it
sound like the cold war. But there are cru
cial differences, none more notable than
China’s inextricable integration into theWASHINGTON, DC
Joe Biden is determined that China should not displace AmericaPushing back