US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (fourth left) attends a meeting with President Xi Jinping (right) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on June 19. Xi hosted Blinken for a 35-minute dialogue, capping two days of high-level talks by the US secretary of state with Chinese officials. Photo: AFP
Opinion
Stephen Roach
Stephen Roach
US-China conflict resolution needs more than a latter-day Nixon going to Beijing
The meagre results and political context around Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing showed the shortcomings of a personalised approach to diplomacy
Shifting to a more institutionalised model of engagement would take conflict resolution out of the hands of highly sensitive, politically constrained leaders
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s long-delayed trip to Beijing has come and gone. Despite the predictable optimistic spin on the visit – both sides agreed to strengthen people-to-people exchanges and promised to continue talks – it did little to defuse the increasingly fraught conflict between the United States and China.
The failure to re-establish military-to-military communications is especially worrisome given the recent near-collisions between the two superpowers’ warships in the Taiwan Strait and aircraft over the South China Sea. This is to say nothing of reported Chinese surveillance activity in Cuba, which bears an eerie resemblance to the events that precipitated the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 – one of the most frightening moments of the Cold War. The risks of accidental conflict remain high.
The underlying problem is overreliance on personalised diplomacy. Yes, that played a crucial role in the early days of the US-China relationship. More than just stagecraft, US president Richard Nixon’s historic trip to China in 1972 was a decisive strategic gambit aimed at the triangulation of the Soviet Union. Multiple layers of personal connections helped to tip the balance of power in the Cold War: Nixon and Mao Zedong at the top, underpinned by Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai working out the details of US-China engagement.
But those days are over. Personalised diplomacy has outlived its usefulness. With management of the US-China relationship in the hands of politically constrained, thin-skinned leaders, disputes between the two superpowers have become exceedingly difficult to resolve. Neither leader can afford to be seen as weak. Conflict resolution is now more about face, less about grand strategy.
President Xi Jinping, for example, insisted on sitting at the head of the table in his brief 35-minute meeting with Blinken, casting the senior US diplomat in a decidedly subservient light. No sooner had Blinken left the country than US President Joe Biden referred to the Chinese leader as a dictator, further inflaming China’s sensitivities.
Such an approach no longer works because diplomacy derives its legitimacy from domestic politics. On the US side, poisonous anti-China sentiment tied Blinken’s hands long before he set foot in Beijing. US Representative Mike Gallagher, the Republican chairman of the new House Select Committee on China, has the audacity to blame the country’s China problem on engagement, arguing on CNBC and in The Wall Street Journal that “engagement invariably leads to appeasement in the face of foreign aggression”.
Unfortunately, Gallagher speaks for a strident anti-China Washington consensus that left Blinken with few options. Bipartisan support of such an extreme view all but ruled out any creative US diplomacy.
Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin listens during a hearing of a special House committee dedicated to countering China on Capitol Hill in Washington on February 28. Photo: AP
Despite its one-party system, domestic political considerations are equally important in China. The legitimacy of Xi’s power rests on his so-called Chinese dream, which promises “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. Yet without sustained economic growth, Xi risks breaking that promise and facing a wave of public and Communist Party anger.
That makes a growth shortfall in China especially of concern. While a widely expected stimulus could alleviate near-term pressures on the economy, the confluence of demographic and productivity headwinds is far more problematic for medium- to longer-term growth prospects. Add to that the foregone growth that comes from ongoing conflict with the US and its allies and there can be little doubt that Chinese politics are tightly constrained by the country’s mounting “rejuvenation deficit”.
Fragile egos only exacerbate the problem. Rhetorical miscues, stagecraft and name-calling all get blown out of proportion. When leaders lack the tough skin required for conflict resolution, the hair-trigger reactions of personalised diplomacy backfire.
A new approach is urgently needed. Shifting to a more institutionalised model of engagement would take conflict resolution out of the hands of hyperreactive, politically constrained leaders. That means reworking the architecture of US-China engagement to be more process-oriented, incorporating greater technical expertise at the working-group level and focusing more on a strategy of mutual problem-solving.
My proposal for a US-China secretariat goes well beyond earlier attempts at institutional engagement – namely, the Strategic and Economic Dialogue and the Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade. Both efforts failed to prevent the current conflict before being cancelled by the Trump administration, and Biden has opted not to resuscitate the initiatives. But that is because they didn’t go far enough in providing a permanent, robust framework for relationship management.
02:49
‘China will not challenge or replace the US’, Xi tells Blinken at crucial meeting
‘China will not challenge or replace the US’, Xi tells Blinken at crucial meeting
Like most, I am suspicious of a bureaucratic approach to multiple thorny problems between two powerful countries. The Washington consensus believes the Chinese have long favoured talk over action, process over compliance, temporising over compromise. A new bureaucracy, the argument goes, would add complexity and layers of decision-making to the already-challenging task of addressing fundamental disagreements between contrasting systems. Progress will still be difficult.
Still, a more institutionalised approach is preferable to the current politicised, personalised diplomacy. What worked 50 years ago doesn’t work today. The context is very different for both countries. Conflict resolution needs far more than a latter-day Nixon going to China.
Personalised diplomacy is at a dead end in resolving the US-China conflict. Escaping from the quagmire of escalating tensions requires a new architecture of engagement. A US-China secretariat is the best option to navigate the long and arduous path of conflict resolution before it is too late.
Stephen S. Roach, a former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, is a faculty member at Yale University and the author, most recently, of Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives (Yale University Press, 2022). Copyright:Project Syndicate
