Biden’s China policy tweak is welcome, but it’s still based on a fantasy

As Sullivan made clear in an extensive speech, the US is making a partial return to a realpolitik approach to China
However, the policy framework remains unchanged: China is still an ideological ‘other’ that is not democratising as the US wished

Lanxin Xiang

Published: 4:30pm, 18 Feb 2024

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US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s speech last month praising the Biden administration’s China policy was remarkable not because it offered outstanding strategic vision, but rather because of the lack of it.

Under Biden’s China policy, the bilateral relationship became a contest of “democracy vs autocracy”. More than a way to define the nature of great power relations in the 21st century, it became a framework for policymaking. This misguided approach has actually restrained policy options, as it means great-power politics is handled with ideological rigidity.

In his speech, Sullivan reasserted that China is the “only state with both the intent to reshape the international order and the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it”. Moreover, Beijing sought to “catch up and surpass” the US in hi-tech. It is “working to make the world more dependent on China” and “taking steps to adapt the international system to accommodate its own system and preferences”, he said.

Yet, notably, Sullivan did not frame US-China relations as “democracy vs communist autocracy”. This is in sharp contrast to the US-China dialogue that took place in Anchorage in 2021, when Secretary of State Antony Blinken sought to legitimise America’s right to interfere with what China considered its internal affairs, by stating that China’s actions, “including in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyberattacks on the US and economic coercion towards our allies … threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability”.

This “my way or the highway” hubris was Bidenism at its best. In other words, whether the bilateral relationship is competitive, collaborative or adversarial, it is all China’s doing. The US does not need to make any adjustment.

More than three years later, and this approach has achieved little with China. Now, with two wars raging, in Ukraine and Gaza, there has been a rude awakening within the Biden team that its “democracy vs autocracy” strategy has all but collapsed. It has dawned on many in the administration that war is not determined by the nature of the regime.

Democracies can launch unjust wars and even commit genocide. If Russia has committed a war crime but Israel has not, the popular Western argument linking Ukraine and Taiwan does not make sense to most people in the world.

Sullivan tried to imply that the US government is returning to a pragmatic approach vis-à-vis China. He gave credit, albeit grudgingly, to the Trump administration for updating “the diagnosis of the scope and nature of the China challenge” – in other words, for launching a trade war with China – but dismissed its effort as lacking strategic content.

In reality, Donald Trump’s approach to China was far more effective precisely because he recognised that great-power politics cannot be based on ideology.

Sullivan noted that the US “did not want to return to an earlier approach” that was “based on more optimistic assumptions” about China’s trajectory, and therefore had adopted the current adversarial approach.

He was referencing the US policy elite’s long-standing fantasy about the “democratisation of China”. Such a fantasy – a version of the convergence theory, which presumes that, as a society develops, it begins to resemble developed societies by adopting their norms – has been around since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms more than 40 years ago.

But the reforms were not meant to alter the fundamental structure of the political system. Deng wanted only Perestroika, or restructuring, not Glasnost, or openness, to use the fashionable Russian concepts at the time. Apparently, few in the Biden team understood that.

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan speaks during a press briefing at the White House in Washington on February 14. Photo: Reuters

The real question is, why does the West keep blaming China for a non-convergence scenario of the two political systems when no Chinese leader has promised to justify such a trajectory? The answer has to be found in the paucity of knowledge of Chinese culture and history.

Debate over the nature of the Chinese system is not new. One early debate took place in the mid-17th century. The Chinese rites controversy was a bitter dispute within the Catholic Church over a question raised by the Jesuit missionaries in China: were cultural traditions, such as rituals honouring ancestors, compatible with Christianity? The Jesuits believed in accommodating these practices, but most others disagreed.

Why is China finding it so difficult to close the chapter on Qing history?

At that time in Europe, the modern notion of democracy had not yet been established as a rhetorical tool to disparage other political systems, so whether the Chinese way of governance was legitimate was irrelevant. But the Western dominance of the globe since the 18th century has created hegemony of Western thought.

A new orthodoxy promoting “progress” against “backwardness”, and “civilisation” against “barbarism”, justified colonial expansion into non-Western territories. In the Western vision, democracy is the pinnacle of political development for all human societies. Thus, we have arrived at the “end of history” without any room for improvement.

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Informed by this Eurocentric tradition, Sullivan cannot move beyond a parochial vision of politics, despite the fact that the legitimacy of the democratic system has recently been undermined by American internal politics.

Sullivan offered a tacit admission that Bidenism has failed, and America’s partial return to a realpolitik approach to great-power relations should be welcome, but it can only offer a halfway house for those ideological fanatics to sober up a bit.

No one should expect the recent easing of US-China tensions to last very long. A new Trump administration, by contrast, may offer a real chance to reset the relationship, precisely because it would be a departure from Bidenism.

Lanxin Xiang is a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center, Washington, DC