20 Briefing America’s China policy The Economist July 17th 2021
their emissions (though Mr Biden’s ambi
tions may be thwarted by opposition at
home) but it will be hard for them to come
together to set rules of the road for others.
There are economic risks, too. There are al
most no advocates for free and unfettered
trade around Mr Biden, and that suits the
architects of his China policy well.
During the 2020 presidential campaign
Jake Sullivan, now Mr Biden’s national se
curity adviser, coauthored an article call
ing on foreignpolicy experts to stop defer
ring to economists and move past the as
sumption “that more trade is always the
answer”. He is in no rush to get rid of Mr
Trump’s tariffs and “phase one” trade deal,
which required China to meet specific im
port quotas; they may not be to his taste,
but they could supply leverage for future
negotiations. This was despite the judg
ment of economists outside the adminis
tration—and some inside—that the tariffs
hurt America more than they hurt China.
There are also areas where trade with
China is seen as a risk in and of itself. Chi
na’s dominance over the markets for some
key resources, while not yet a nationalse
curity problem, could become one. Mr Sul
livan, Mr Campbell, Mr Doshi and others
want America to reduce the degree to
which it relies on its antagonist for some
critical commodities. In June the adminis
tration completed a supplychain review
that identified areas that China domi
nates—including rareearth metals, lithi
um and cobalt (vital for highcapacity bat
teries) and some drugs and drug ingredi
ents—and called for America to work with
other countries on how to wean them
selves off the Chinese market.
Such concerns could lead to a bifurca
tion in global trade. But voices warning of
the economic costs such a split would im
pose are exactly those to which Mr Sullivan
wants policymakers to pay less heed. If his
securityfirst view prevails Mr Biden may
go further to decouple the two economies
than did Mr Trump, parts of whose admin
istration exploited his inattention in order
to do less than he would have wished. The
treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, de
layed efforts to impose sanctions on Chi
nese institutions. Officials at the Bureau of
Industry and Security (bis) dragged their
feet on drawing up a list of emerging tech
nologies that could be subject to broad ex
port controls. Customs and Border Protec
tion issued most of its orders to block im
ports of goods made by forced labour in
Xinjiang only in 2020, after Mr Trump had
taken to blaming China for the pandemic.
Mr Biden’s administration is more re
sponsive to his intentions. The machinery
that can be used to blacklist more Chinese
companies has been finetuned, in part to
make it more resistant to legal challenges.
It has maintained virtually all the existing
sanctions, export controls and customs orders, and instituted a few more that were
under way before Mr Trump left office.
These included a ban in June on imports
from a Xinjiangbased company which
produces the type of silicon needed for so
lar cells, because of concerns about the
forced labour of Uyghurs there. Some 45%
of the world’s supply of this highly refined
silicon comes from Xinjiang, and sanc
tions against more of its manufacturers are
expected, if not from the administration,
then through a bill pending in Congress. How blunt, exactly?
In a speech on July 13th Mr Sullivan sig
nalled concerns about companies evading
export controls “in ways that harm nation
al security”. What that posture means in
terms of slowing China’s progress in tech
nologies such as artificial intelligence and
quantum computing is still a matter of
concern for those watching proceedings.
The tech industry has its worries about
China (particularly over the longterm se
curity of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufac
turing Company, the main supplier of the
highestend chips). But it still wants to sell
it more stuff. The most ardent foreign
policy hawks want the toughest actions,
including things they are sure the Biden
administration would not dare to do, such
as banning dollardenominated transac
tions with leading Chinese chipmakers.
Both sides have been keenly interested
in who would serve as the new head of the
bis, seeing the position as a bellwether. But
when, on July 13th, they learned it would be
Alan Estevez, a former Obamaera Penta
gon official with experience conducting
nationalsecurity reviews of foreign in
vestments, they seemed at first little the
wiser. As a nominee to a sensitive post his
chief attribute may be a lack of preconcep
tions as to how he will approach the job.
Beyond the question of how hard to
push, though, lies the disconcerting real
isation that China may well be an immovable object. If American businesses turn
away from China, others will step in. Bon
nie Glaser, a China expert at the German
Marshall Fund, a thinktank, says the best
hope of shaping China’s choices lies in
forming an “antiChina coalition” (though
not explicitly calling it that). Like those
around Mr Biden, she believes that, even
then, the odds of affecting change will not
be good, but “we have to try”.
An usvthem approach has problems.
When Mr Biden presents it as a dichotomy
of democracies versus autocracies, Euro
pean officials wince—and the status of a
country like Vietnam, which Mr Biden
wants onside, becomes problematic. Jude
Blanchette of the Centre for Strategic and
International Studies, another thinktank,
argues that the Biden administration
would be betterserved if it stopped paying
such closeup attention to China and in
stead zoomed out to take a broader view of
the world. America reacts to everything
Chinese leaders do, he says: they adopt an
industrial policy, America adopts an in
dustrial policy; they secure supply chains,
so does America; they have a Belt and Road
Initiative, so must America.
Mr Blanchette argues that America
should take a different page out of Mr Xi’s
playbook: talk less about its adversary and
more about the world it wants to build. “Xi
just does not talk about America a lot.
When they articulate their vision it’s not an
America strategy,” he says. “It’s ‘this is the
role China wants to play in the world over
the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years’.” Like some
members of the Biden administration, Mr
Blanchette looks to the early days of the
cold war for inspiration. Then America
placed its attempts to contain the Soviet
Union within a broader vision of the
world. If today it could articulate such a vi
sion again, it might become clearer how
China fits in and openupa policy shaped
by America’s continuingrole, rather than
purely by China’s rise.n