Political tensions between Beijing and Washington, the two great global powers, have been extraordinarily tense, particularly since the Chinese Spy balloon scandal of last month. I say “scandal” here because, quite frankly, spying between great powers is to be expected. The United States spies on China; China spies on America. That is how great powers behave, and even with diplomatic agreements between two great powers against spying, there will still be spying.
And spying is not always for nefarious reasons that end in death and national subjugation. Still, the spy balloon incident, which was probably an overreaction on the part of Washington, has increased temperatures between the two great global powers to alarming levels. Biden, heading into a tough re-election fight, did not want to appear weak on China, already a GOP talking point. But shooting down aerial objects, China-related or not, throughout February, was not helpful to the situation. And it certainly didn’t help matters that Beijing domestically treated the overreaction as a sign of the decline of Washington’s influence and said so publicly.
It gets even more complicated. Last week, during the annual National People's Congress, President Xi of China accused the US of deliberately suppressing his country’s rise. He’s not altogether wrong, which is why we need a reset and fast. According to ABC News:
In a closed-door session with delegates from China's private sector Monday, Xi made a rare direct reference to the United States when blaming Washington for his nation's economic challenges.
In the Chinese-language readout of the meeting from the Xinhua News Agency, Xi said, "The Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-round containment, containment and suppression on our country, bringing unprecedented severe challenges to the our development." The criticism does not appear in the English-language version.
It was, by Chinese diplomatic standards, a significant attack.
Enter: Australia, which arguably, has the one of the most complex Western relationships with China.
Can Australia help lower the temperature? Kevin Rudd, who is currently the President and CEO of Asia Society and the former the Prime Minister of Australia is worried. Rudd also happens to be the only former head of government that speaks Mandarin. He gave an “Exit Interview,” of sorts, on Fareed Zakaria’s Global GPS on Sunday as he becomes the next Australian Ambassador to Washington with a mission to lower the temperature between Washington and Beijing. Why would a former Australian PM take a “demotion” as Ambassador the US? That’s where it gets very, very interesting. Rudd, in as diplomatic a language as he could muster, appeared very worried on the show about the possibility of an actual hot war breaking out between the United States and China. Here is how Rudd described the direct reference to the United States by Xi on GPS:
RUDD: I must admit, as someone who looked at this for last 40 years, I was surprised. It is probably not since the '90s since I've seen a Chinese paramount leader attack the United States by name. They usually have an expression which says such and such a country or --
ZAKARIA: Certain nations.
RUDD: -- certain countries.
ZAKARIA: Yes. Yes.
RUDD: And that diplomacy was pushed to one side. And then, of course, the foreign minister went one step further by saying, if the United States continues its current posture in particular on Taiwan, inevitably this will result in conflict. I've never heard that from a Chinese foreign minister before.
So, I think two things are at play here. I think both Xi Jinping and his team are under considerable domestic economic pressure at present from a very slow economy. And this has been an opportunity for Xi Jinping to say, we know you're going through a hard time domestically, growth has been down, unemployment has been up, prices are a problem in certain areas, but the United States and its allies have been making life impossible for us by the pressure they've brought to bear on us domestically.
So, I think that is one of the rationales. But, you know, when a Chinese president says something as definitive as this it also has its own intrinsic foreign security policy significance. And I do believe it further accelerates China's preparedness militarily for a future action over Taiwan if and when Xi Jinping so chooses.
This is something I worried about deeply in my post on the spy balloon scandal. China’s abrupt reversal of its COVID ZERO policy revealed fault lines in the central governments control. The Biden administration’s overreaction played into Xi’s anxieties, allowing him to score (much needed) domestic policy points in the wake of his embarrassing reversal on COVID ZERO. And that leads the world to where we are now, a very dangerous place, potentially. Here, at length, was what I wrote on February 18th:
What if Biden’s continued provocations push China into a very dark place, like the place where Putin dwells now. The “Non Aligned” bloc during the Cold War has already emerged, 2.0. What if they side with China over America? What if Xi, reeling from a series of very poor decisions, worried about his hold on the country after the failure to vaccinate the elderly, decides to side openly with Russia in the Ukraine invasion?
Then, what? What if President Xi went so far as to offer military and technological aid to Russia in the next year, as the Ukraine War reaches a fever pitch? Then, what? Do we escalate more, perhaps, and bring the world closer to another World War, hot, not just Cold?
We had better be prepared to answer these questions, because the escalation continues and we know not the breaking point. Further, that escalation on the American side is bipartisan, meaning, there are no checks against overreach. There are no checks against overreach, that is, until, China decides it has had enough.
And I worry about this even more today than I did last month.
What we talk about when we talk about trans rights. (TNY)
“Barbara Walters died on December 30 at the age of 93 during a low ebb in the news cycle. Her home of 50 years, ABC News, pressed PLAY on a two-hour prime-time special, Our Barbara, but it aired during the attentional wasteland of New Year’s Day. Walters, whose ambition had no off switch, would have been irritated about the timing.” (NYMag)
Micronesia’s President Writes Bombshell Letter on China’s ‘Political Warfare’ (The Diplomat)
President Kagame softens stance on ‘Hotel Rwanda’ activist (Yinka Adegoke/SEMAFOR)
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