In Trump, China has an adversary who’s not afraid to push back – even if it means economic pain

Communist Party leaders have overplayed their hand by tightening control over Hong Kong with a national security law
Trump and his senior advisers not only believe in the law of the jungle, but are also unafraid to wield raw power against their foes

Minxin Pei

Published: 3:00am, 12 Jul 2020

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Some of the Chinese government’s recent policies seem to make little practical sense, with its decision to impose a national security law on Hong Kong being a prime example. The law’s rushed enactment by the National People’s Congress effectively ends the “one country, two systems” model that has prevailed since 1997, when the city was returned from British to Chinese rule, and tensions between China and the West have increased sharply.

Hong Kong’s future as an international financial centre is now in peril, while resistance by residents determined to defend their freedom will make the city even less stable. Moreover, China’s latest move will help the US to persuade wavering European allies to join its nascent anti-China coalition. The long-term consequences for China are therefore likely to be dire.

It is tempting to see China’s major policy miscalculations as a consequence of overconcentration of power in the hands of President Xi Jinping. This argument is not necessarily wrong, but it omits a more important reason for the Chinese government’s self-destructive policies: the mindset of the Communist Party of China.

The party sees the world as, first and foremost, a jungle. Having been shaped by its own brutal struggle for power against impossible odds between 1921 and 1949, the party is convinced that its long-term survival depends solely on raw power.

When the balance of power is against it, the party must rely on cunning and caution to survive. The late Deng Xiaoping aptly summarised this strategic realism with his foreign-policy dictum: “hide your strength and bide your time”.

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Hong Kong hotel becomes home to Beijing’s new national security office in the city

So, when China pledged in the 1984 Joint Declaration with Britain to maintain Hong Kong’s autonomy for 50 years after the 1997 handover, it was acting out of weakness rather than a belief in international law.

As the balance of power has since shifted in its favour, China has consistently been willing to break its earlier commitments when doing so serves its interests. In addition to cracking down on Hong Kong, for example, China is attempting to solidify its claims in disputed areas of the South China Sea by building militarised artificial islands there.

The party’s world view is also coloured by a belief in the power of greed. Although Western countries might profess fealty to human rights and democracy, the Communist Party believed that they could not afford to lose access to the Chinese market.

Such cynicism now permeates China’s strategy of asserting control over Hong Kong. Chinese leaders expect the West’s anger at their actions to fade quickly, calculating that Western firms are too heavily vested in the city to let the perils of China’s police state be a deal breaker.

Western governments had expected that credible threats of sanctions against China would be a powerful deterrent to Communist Party aggression. But judging by how China has thumbed its nose at the West, this has obviously not been the case.

These Western threats do not lack credibility: comprehensive sanctions encompassing travel, trade, technology transfers, and financial transactions could seriously undermine Hong Kong’s economic well-being and Chinese prestige.

Why US sanctions in the Hong Kong Autonomy Act do nothing for Hong Kong

Until recently, the West’s acquiescence in the face of Chinese assertiveness appeared to have vindicated the Community Party’s Hobbesian world view. Before the radical shift in US policy towards China, Chinese leaders had encountered practically no resistance.

But in US President Donald Trump and his national security hawks, China has finally met its match. Like their counterparts in Beijing, the US president and his senior advisers not only believe in the law of the jungle, but are also unafraid to wield raw power against their foes.

Unfortunately for the Communist Party, therefore, it now has to contend with a far more determined adversary. Worse still, America’s willingness to absorb enormous short-term economic pain to gain a long-term strategic edge over China indicates that greed has lost its primacy.

In particular, the US strategy of “decoupling” – severing the dense web of Sino-American economic ties – has caught China by surprise, because no party leader ever imagined that the US government would be willing to write off the Chinese market in pursuit of broader geopolitical objectives.

For the first time since the end of the Cultural Revolution, the party faces a genuine existential threat, mainly because its mindset has led it to commit a series of strategic errors. And its latest intervention in Hong Kong suggests that it has no intention of changing course.

Minxin Pei is Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and a non-resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Copyright: Project Syndicate

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