In the five days of his visit to Asia, spent in allies South Korea and Japan, President Joe Biden wanted to remind China who its true strategic rival is in the Cold War 2.0 that dramatically gained heated tones with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
As he has hinted at other times, the American seeks to use the example of the US-led punishment of Russia as a threat to what he perceives as expansionism by the administration of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin’s closest ally and fierce critic of the sanctions regime applied to Moscow. .
The problem for Biden, however, is twofold. First, Taiwan is not Ukraine: despite being autonomous, the island is not an independent country even in the eyes of the UN (United Nations), and the ambiguous policy that guides relations between Washington and Beijing in theory presupposes Chinese law. to that territory.
In practice, of course, it is something else, and since Donald Trump fired the first shots of the new Cold War, in 2017, the United States has only increased support for Taipei independence. It’s a recipe for confusion, even further waving a protocol of economic sanctions like the fine if Beijing exercises what it considers its right, to absorb the island.
Here comes the second node, which is Sino-American interdependence. China is not Russia, it has an economy ten times the size of Putin’s, and it has a central presence in global supply chains.
In 2021, the US purchased US$506 billion in Chinese products, its largest source of imports, and the Asian country is its fourth largest export destination, US$151 billion. For comparison, the values ​​were respectively US$ 22 billion and US$ 6 billion in trade with the Russians.
All of this demonstrates that unplugging China from the world, like what the West tries to do with Russia and still fails to fully and painlessly in the process, is a very complex idea. But Biden’s apparent calculation seems to take into account the difficulties facing Xi.
Since coming to power in 2012, the Chinese leader has consolidated a more personalist regime into a dictatorship that was notorious for its lack of a unified public face. Its external assertiveness, and Taiwan is just the clearest example, has grown a lot.
The American reaction went through a trade war and all kinds of political clashes, from Chinese intervention in Hong Kong’s autonomy to handling the Covid-19 pandemic. Biden accelerated that by investing heavily in the Quad, a group with Australia, India and Japan that will meet on Tuesday (24), making a military pact with Australians and Britons in the Indo-Pacific and, now, a foreign trade initiative with 13 countries in the region to face the Chinese.
In Beijing, the movement on the one hand reinforces Xi, but apparently also feeds wings of the communist dictatorship that do not want such an open confrontation with the West.
The pandemic and the ensuing economic hardships have helped to wind up dissent, which, of course, is quite difficult to gauge. Today, analysts place Vice Premier Han Zheng, 1 of 7 members of the exclusive Politburo Standing Committee and representative of the economic interests of coastal regions centered on Shanghai, at Xi’s pole of power.
He defends a different vision than Xi for dealing with the real estate and infrastructure sector, which is experiencing a bubble whose controlled burst has been Beijing’s central objective since last year. Xi has a more interventionist bias, while Han seeks a more market-based solution.
Growing criticism of Beijing’s Covid zero policy also counts, especially with the impact this has had on Chinese economic activity. All of this will flow into the Communist Party congress in November, which has been shaping up to be an outing for Xi to secure an unprecedented third term.
Biden realized this, and the anti-China speech also has its domestic motivation: also that month, his Democratic Party faces midterm congressional elections.
