Unilateral US action against China on trade will not be enough to change the Asian country’s ongoing violation of international norms and institutions, two leading China security experts warned US senators on Wednesday. As trade officials in Washington pursue a resolution to a months-long trade war with China that the United States has waged alone, the experts said the US should focus on building new international alliances to pressure China to roll back numerous alleged improper practices including theft of intellectual property, cyberespionage, development deals that put host countries in debt, and military aggression in the South China Sea. “An ‘America first’ strategy is a very Chinese strategy,” said Oriana Mastro, a political military affairs strategist at the US Air Force Reserve, at a hearing convened by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to examine a “new approach for an era of US-China competition”. “One country doing it alone doesn’t have a great impact, because China can substitute its trade by going somewhere else. “There’s no amount of threatening that we can do that would cause [Beijing] to make changes to human rights, or to the economy domestically if they think it will undermine their power. “This is an area where coalitions matter, because China will only stop behaviour when it doesn’t work.” Jim Talent, a commissioner on the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), said economic deals were not “the way to go, and I don’t think it’s going to change behaviour”. The USCC was set up by Congress in 2000 to monitor and investigate national security threats to the US posed by the trade relationship between the world’s two biggest economies. US trade official says ‘major issues’ still unresolved in China talks Beijing would opt to pursue “more of the same kind of illicit activity that we’ve seen in the past” rather than cede control of fundamental areas of the state-controlled economy, Talent said. The former Missouri senator called on the US to work multilaterally with smaller countries within China’s geographical orbit to deal with “Chinese abuses”. The US government, he added, must reassure these nations that “if they cooperate and help us, we will protect them from any kind of reprisals”. Wednesday’s hearing came after Beijing criticised US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for telling US energy firm executives on Tuesday that China was blocking Southeast Asian countries from accessing energy reserves in the South China Sea. US calls China one of the worst regimes for human rights in 2018 “Nations outside the region should refrain from stirring up trouble and disrupting the harmonious situation,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said in a rebuke aimed at Pompeo. In written testimony to the Senate committee, Mastro said the South China Sea was at the heart of US-China geopolitical competition and called on the US to “move beyond symbolic displays of force such as the freedom of navigation operations”. She urged the US to build “a new institution or coalition of like-minded states that patrol the waters and protect all countries’ rights of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea”. On trade, the US should consider establishing a new international governing body focused on issues such as intellectual property protection, rather than “tacking it onto the existing institutions”, Mastro said in Wednesday’s hearing She added that international institutions were designed to be “sticky” and “difficult to change”. European Union calls for united front against ‘rival’ China “I’m not surprised that institutions built decades ago cannot handle what to do about cyber [security],” she said. The ability of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which China joined in 2001, to monitor, investigate and punish China’s apparent flouting of international trade rules has come under increasing scrutiny from both the US and other member states. At the same time, consensus has grown within the US foreign policy community that economic engagement with China has not led to market liberalisation or political reform within the country. “After 20 years of helping China prosper economically and hoping that they would emerge as a responsible partner on the world stage, it is time for US policymakers to acknowledge this path was not the right path,” foreign relations committee chair James Risch, a Republican senator from Idaho, said on Wednesday. How the US nudged the EU towards a tougher stand on China “China exports corruption and its authoritarian model across the globe. It uses cheap financing as a debt trap, and has built a police state that the Chinese Communist Party uses to limit free expression that contradicts the party line. “These are not the actions of a responsible stakeholder.” Beyond seeking the support of global allies to confront China, the US should also bolster its investments in critical areas of research and development, Mastro told senators. Under US President Donald Trump’s 2020 budget proposal, released on Monday, funding for the National Science Foundation, which supports basic science and engineering research across the country, would be slashed 12 per cent to US$7.1 billion. China’s foreign investment law is too vague, says US business group That reduction would be significantly higher than the 5 per cent cut across all non-defence spending that Trump’s budget is aiming for. Congress is not expected to pass the proposed spending plan. Additional reporting by Wendy Wu