A24 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022
the opinions essayundermine the Western-led system of free trade,
rule of law and universal rights. Now, after decades
of believing that China might someday fully join the
multilateral economic system created after World
War II, most U.S. officials no longer imagine that
China can be more like us. Instead, the goal is to
defend an international system that is under attack,
protect the interests of the United States and its
allies, and fight for the values that underpin our
fundamental humanity against authoritarianism.
The competitors represent a centrist foreign policy
establishment that is regarded with deep suspicion
by both the far left and the far right in American
politics. They are trying to cement a long-term
strategy toward China that can weather whatever
administration comes next, and they know their
time in power is short.
An unlikely reset
China had a warning shot waiting for Biden’s
China hands when they walked into the White
House on Jan. 20, 2021. That day, Beijing imposed
sanctions on outgoing secretary of state Mike
Pompeo, national security adviser Robert
C. O’Brien, his deputy Matthew Pottinger and
25 other Trump officials in retaliation for Washing-
ton’s posture toward China. The move was meant to
threaten the newcomers: If you continue Trump’s
policy, you will pay the same price.
One unfortunate aspect of the Trump years
needed mending early: The former president’s
bullying approach to allies had alienated large parts
of the international community. Meanwhile,
Trump’s racist rhetoric during the pandemic fueled
rising hate and violence directed at Asian Ameri-
cans here at home. That alienated progressives and
politicized the issue in American politics, which
narrowed the space for bipartisan cooperation on
how to respond to China’s behavior. The Biden team
knew that China was too big and powerful to
confront without the support of both political
parties and that of other countries facing the same
threat.
The Biden team’s first move was not to launch the
traditional review of U.S. policy often done by new
presidents. Instead, the competitors spent several
weeks huddling with allies, informing them of the
hard line they intended to take toward Beijing and
asking them to rally around it. In the early months of
2021, Rosenberger’s office at the NSC led hours-long
“virtual roadshows” with officials in France, Ger-
many, Britain and the Baltic states. The sessions
were meant to reassure allies and hear them out so
that U.S. officials could identify opportunities for
cooperation as well as potential weaknesses in a
united front.
Biden spoke with his counterparts in Japan,
Australia and South Korea before finally accepting a
call from Xi on Feb 10. The two-hour call was
friendly. Xi tried the personal touch, retelling stories
of the two men’s time together, suggesting his team
had compiled research on their past interactions
over the years. “We did get the sense that Xi had
come into that first phone call hoping for a reset,” a
senior Biden official said. “He really went out of his
way to bash the Trump administration and blame
them for all the ills that have befallen the United
States and China.”
Despite the mostly positive call, the Biden team
tried to make clear to Beijing that a friendlier reset
of the relationship was not in the offing. Biden was
also aware that his familiarity with Xi could be a
liability. “Let’s get something straight,” he said later
when questioned by a reporter. “We know each other
well. We’re not old friends. It’s pure business.” The
truth lay somewhere in between.
The Biden-Xi call paved the way for the first
meeting of top diplomats a month later in Anchor-
age. On March 17, a day before the scheduled session,
the Biden administration announced sanctions on
24 Chinese Communist Party officials for Beijing’s
recent crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, in
part to show Biden would not back down from
asserting American values. Then, at the top of the
Anchorage meeting, while cameras rolled, Blinken
listed the U.S. government’s “deep concerns” about
China’s behavior on Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber-
attacks and economic coercion.
China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, and foreign
minister, Wang Yi, reacted angrily. Yang insisted
that reporters remain in the room while he accused
the United States of its own human rights violations,
including the “slaughtering” of Black Americans.
“We believe that it is important for the United States
to change its own image and to stop advancing its
own democracy in the rest of the world,” he said.
“Many people within the United States actually have
little confidence in the democracy of the United
States.”
Yang’s comments got most of the attention in
news accounts, but at this stage both sides were
opening with hard lines. Publicly, the Chinese said
they wanted to be treated as equals. But, as they
would later detail in two written lists of demands,
what the Chinese really wanted was for the Biden
administration to cease all criticism of anything
Beijing considered a core — and therefore untouch-
able — issue. “Behind closed doors,” an American
official said, “... it was quite clear both Yang and
Wang really came to the table essentially saying,
‘Roll back all the Trump administration’s policies.’
They were given clear marching orders by the boss
to take a very tough line and to show no give with the
Americans and to really push us into trying to see if
they could back us off our approach.”
Team Biden was having none of it. Three days
after Anchorage, the administration announced
new sanctions over China’s abuse of Uyghur Mus-
lims. In effect, the U.S.-China relationship was at a
stalemate, with both sides refusing to blink.
The competitors knew that many in the Washing-
ton bureaucracy, the business community, and
China hands in think tanks and universities did not
agree — or perhaps recognize — that the rules had
changed. Lobbyists, former trade officials and
others with economic incentives to keep U.S.-China
relations on an even keel typically assumed Biden
would end the Trump-era hostilities and return to
the cooperation of the Barack Obama days. But, as
the NSC’s Campbell would later explain, “The period
that was broadly described as engagement has come
to an end.”
One big change in the U.S. approach was to do
away with “linkage.” No longer would China’s
participation or progress on issues of common
interest such as climate change or North Korea be
grounds for Washington to grant concessions on
other fronts. “We are not in the business of trading
cooperation with China on climate change as a favor
that Beijing is doing for the United States,” Sullivan
said at the Aspen Security Forum in April.
To the Chinese leadership, however, it made little
THE OPINIONS ESSAY FROM A23
sense to work with Washington on, say, the climate,
while the Biden administration was attacking Bei-
jing on Hong Kong or Taiwan. It wasn’t long before
Biden officials charged with reaching solutions on
multilateral matters found themselves unable to
make progress on any front. Those officials, in turn,
often argued internally against many of the tougher
policies.
Biden’s climate envoy, John F. Kerry, had been a
leading proponent of engagement when he was
secretary of state, once inviting Yang to his Boston
home for the weekend. Now, Kerry’s main task was
to gain China’s buy-in for the COP26 climate summit
in November. In June, while Kerry was jetting back
and forth to Beijing, the administration imposed
crippling sanctions on China’s main silicon compa-
ny. Chinese officials told Kerry they would not
cooperate under these circumstances, and Kerry
complained publicly about the squeeze. “On the one
hand, we’re saying to them, ‘You have to do more to
help deal with the climate,’” he told reporters. “And
on the other hand, their solar panels are being
sanctioned, which makes it harder for them to sell
them.”
But if the Biden team had divisions, Beijing was
unable to exploit them. In July, Deputy Secretary of
State Wendy R. Sherman traveled to Tianjin, China,
as part of an Asia tour. Here was a chance to engage
with a top U.S. official not regarded as a proponent
of more confrontation. But instead of welcoming
Sherman, Beijing treated her with disrespect, refus-
ing at first to give her high-level meetings and then
— before her meetings had even concluded —
releasing a harsh rendering of the session. “The
United States wants to reignite the sense of national
purpose by establishing China as an ‘imaginary
enemy,’ ” Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng told
Sherman, according to the preemptive Chinese
news release.A superficial detente
Some modest progress came from Sherman’s
visit. Working groups were established on journalist
access and releasing detained Americans. Kerry
managed to secure a bland statement from Beijing
to distribute at the climate summit in November.
Internally, Kerry often argued against measures that
would increase pressure on China over its human
rights abuses, several officials told me. Sherman
took a tougher line than Kerry, but she remained
focused on finding avenues for engagement. Despite
their efforts, the administration continued to im-
pose sanctions on China for a range of violations.
By and large, the competitors won the important
rounds. “You’ve got a cohort of people whose entire
careers were made around engagement,” said Mat-
thew Turpin, who served in the Pentagon during the
Obama administration and in the NSC during the
Trump administration. “And it didn’t work. So, we’re
changing.”
The tactical differences between officials inside
the Biden team are not to be confused with the more
fundamental objections of some progressive Demo-
crats, who view Biden’s tougher line with Beijing as a
path toward more defense spending and inevitable
conflict. In a June Foreign Affairs essay titled“Washington’s Dangerous New Consensus on Chi-
na,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) advocated a relation-
ship based on cooperation, not conflict. His argu-
ments dovetail with those in official Communist
Party propaganda: Don’t blame China’s aggression
for the downturn in relations; blame the United
States.
Both competitors and engagers take seriously Xi’s
threats to Taiwan. But they don’t agree on what
should be done. The competitors moved quietly to
deepen U.S. cooperation with the Taipei government
led by President Tsai Ing-wen: The State Depart-
ment put out new rules for how to engage with
Taiwanese officials even though Washington and
Taipei lack formal diplomatic relations. The Penta-
gon assembled naval exercises in the South China
Sea with allies as distant as the Netherlands. The
NSC worked with the governments in Tokyo and
Seoul — with some success — to be more public
about their support for Taiwan.
Officially, U.S. policy regarding Taiwan has not
changed. But, unofficially, U.S. officials realize that
the strategic balance across the Taiwan Strait is
tilting heavily toward Beijing. Xi’s actions and
rhetoric have sharpened fears he intends to unify
China and Taiwan before he steps down. For all the
maneuvering behind the scenes, however, Biden has
sent mixed signals as to whether he would send
U.S. forces to defend Taipei.
In September, the competitors made their biggest
strategic play — a new alliance expanding military
cooperation with Australia and the United King-
dom. Called “AUKUS,” the deal has as its cornerstone
a commitment to share nuclear submarine technol-
ogy with Australia. AUKUS was not the Biden team’s
idea, a senior official told me; credit belonged to
British and Australian officials. China had been
battering Australia economically throughout the
pandemic in retaliation for its government calling
for an independent investigation into the origins of
the coronavirus. Meanwhile, Britain was looking to
shore up its alliances following Brexit. In response
to the sub deal, China’s acting ambassador to
Australia, Wang Xining, issued a vague threat:
“There’s zero nuclear capacity, technologically, in
Australia, that would guarantee you will be trouble
free, you will be incident free.... And if anything
happened, are the politicians ready to say sorry?”
Biden’s aides tried to mollify the French, who
were incensed over a valuable arms contract nulli-
fied by the AUKUS deal. In the face of Beijing’s ire,
the president seemed to want to turn down the
temperature. “We are not seeking a new Cold War or
a world divided into rigid blocs,” he said at the
United Nations that month.
But the strategy continued. Three days later,
Biden hosted the leaders of Australia, Japan and
India for talks, his first such meeting with the
leaders of “the Quad,” a multinational group that
emerged from the international response to the
2004 Southeast Asian tsunami and has evolved i nto
a diplomatic counterweight to China in Asia.
Step by step, the Biden team had by fall put in
place a tough China policy of its own design, more
nuanced than Trump’s. Biden officials had rained
sanctions on China, reinforced the alliance diplo-matically, and to some degree militarily, and yet
made clear that it wanted to keep channels to
Beijing open. This stiff but mostly consistent
behavior was something Beijing could at least
understand.
Now the goal was to translate that understanding
into a stable, if not exactly friendly, relationship.
Biden and Xi had a phone call in September that was
used to tee up a meeting between their designated
envoys: Yang representing Xi, Sullivan representing
Biden. The resulting six-hour meeting in Zurich on
Oct. 6 was considered by those on the U.S. side to be
the most professional conversation between the two
governments in 2021. Gone were the public insults.
A long list of issues was constructively discussed,
though there were no big breakthroughs. At the end,
Yang and Sullivan met one-on-one, with only
interpreters in the room.
The Zurich meeting paved the way for a virtual
summit between Biden and Xi on Nov. 15, which
produced broad agreement to pursue “strategic
stability.” Afterward, both governments praised
steps that might lead to cooperation on nuclear
nonproliferation and countering narcotics. The
Washington establishment hailed the Biden-Xi vir-
tual summit as a needed improvement to the tense
relationship. Internally, the Biden team regarded it
more modestly — “as a steam release valve,” one
official said, “that let off a bit of the pressure that’s
building in the containerized object.”
Almost immediately, the superficial detente came
under strain. In early December, the administration
announced it would send no officials to the Winter
Olympics in Beijing, to protest China’s extensive
human rights abuses. Soon after, the public war of
words resumed.The road ahead
Upon returning to government, several top Biden
officials said they were struck by how determined
Beijing had become in implementing Xi’s strategy
against the West. U.S. intelligence assessments, they
said, portray Xi as a man in a hurry to secure China’s
supremacy in the hierarchy of nations and prove the
superiority of its autocratic system. Xi has shared
this intention with others, including Biden, who has
mentioned it in private and in public. “From China
to Russia and beyond, they’re betting the democra-
cies’ days are numbered. They’ve actually told me
democracy is too slow, too bogged down by division
to succeed in today’s rapidly changing, complicated
world,” Biden said on Jan. 6.
The competitors have not always prevailed
inside the Biden administration. Early on, the
NSC’s Campbell and his team pushed for the White
House to reserve vaccine donations for strategic
allies in Asia, including Taiwan and South Korea.
China was engaged in heavy-handed vaccine diplo-
macy, which included coercing countries such as
Paraguay and Nicaragua to drop their diplomatic
recognition of Taiwan in exchange for vaccine
supplies. The State Department team in charge of
vaccine distribution objected, noting that the
United States should not play politics with vac-
cines. Yet Beijing was doing just that: Days after
Nicaragua switched its diplomatic recognition
from Taiwan to China, Beijing delivered a million
doses to Managua. The competitors understand
that large parts of the government are not on board
with their approach.
Meanwhile, many in the business community and
Wall Street continued to press the Biden team to let
go of the tariffs and sanctions that constitute the
leverage of the competitive approach, and smooth
relations with Beijing for the economy’s sake. Inside
the Treasury and Commerce departments, senior
officials continue to resist the harder line. This year
will bring internal fights over trade policy, whether
to engage Beijing on North Korea and inevitably
rising tensions across the Taiwan Strait. Holding a
firm line with Beijing is likely to get harder, not
easier. Nonetheless, an NSC spokesman said Biden’s
team “is moving out in unison in executing our
strategy: out-competing China in the long term by
investing in ourselves and aligning with our allies
and partners.”
As Biden’s second year in office began, U.S. tariffs
on China were still in effect. U.S. and allied ships
traversed the South China Sea more often. Sanctions
for China’s human rights violations and restrictions
on its technology and investments continued to pile
up. Meanwhile, Beijing’s use of masks and other
supplies since the pandemic began as tools of
political coercion awakened other countries to the
reality that China was a sometimes unreliable
partner in a crisis.
At home, an unexpected consensus had emerged:
Americans in both parties want the U.S. government
to pursue a tougher approach to China, polls show.
Ordinary Americans seem to understand that meet-
ing the China challenge means abandoning the
wishful thinking of the past — even if some
influential voices do not. In November, CNN anchor
and Post columnist Fareed Zakaria characterized
the Biden administration’s approach to China as a
failure because Beijing had not gotten on board.
“What has been achieved by this tough talk? What
new trade detail have you got? What concessions has
China made? What climate agreement has been
reached? What has been the net effect of all of that?”
he asked Sullivan on CNN. “I think it’s the wrong
way to think about it,” Sullivan responded. “The
right way to think about it is, have we set the terms
to an effective competition where the United States
is in a position to defend its values and advance its
interests not just in the Indo-Pacific but around the
world?”
Of course, it’s hard to see China as the top issue in
foreign policy when our government isn’t reorganiz-
ing to treat it as such. Some 85 percent of
U.S. foreign military assistance still goes to the
Middle East. Why aren’t U.S. government agencies
that fund private business investments overseas
working to match Chinese infrastructure projects
such as the Belt and Road Initiative throughout
Southeast Asia? Why isn’t there a trade policy for the
region that U.S. officials can articulate? Why hasn’t
Biden nominated anyone to be North Korean
human rights envoy or ambassador to Thailand or
for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations?
Year Two of the Biden presidency might bring
answers to some of these questions. The Biden
team says China is welcome to become a responsi-
ble leader in the current international system. But
its actions are meant to cement a bipartisan
consensus that can last for several presidencies —
and disprove the contention that autocracies are
better at long-term planning than democracies. If
the competitors succeed, they could help preserve
allied security, prosperity and public health. “Our
intention is to prevail in this competition with
China,” a State Department official said. “Let’s just
be very clear about it. It’s a competition, and we
intend to win it.”At home, an unexpected consensus hademerged: Americans in both parties want theU.S. government to pursue a tougherapproach to China, polls show. OrdinaryAmericans seem to understand that meetingthe China challenge means abandoning thewishful thinking of the past.DAREN LIN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST