China Briefing | The Longer Telegram is short-sighted. The US must accept it has a Chinese peer

Name: Biden calls China the ‘most serious competitor’ to the US, in his first foreign policy address
Uploaded: 2021-02-06T01:30:11.000Z
Duration: 3 min 5 s
Description: Biden calls China the ‘most serious competitor’ to the US, in his first foreign policy address

US strategy paper exaggerates China’s ambitions – whether on exporting its development model or usurping the international order – to push an agenda of regime change and containment

While it regurgitates the views of Trump-era China hawks, wiser counsel says China cannot be contained and the US should learn to live with a competitor

Reading Time:4 minutes

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Wang Xiangwei

Published: 9:30am, 6 Feb 2021Updated: 9:30am, 6 Feb 2021

To contain China or not, that is the question for American officials and analysts as President Joe Biden’s new administration ponders how to respond to what it sees as the most significant challenge facing the United States.

Of the flurry of proposals churned out by US think tanks, the strategy paper titled “The Longer Telegram: Toward A New American China Strategy” published by the Atlantic Council late last month has raised some eyebrows among China watchers both in China and the US.

That is partly because the author, self-described as a former senior US official with deep China expertise and experience, has modelled the lengthy paper on the American diplomat George Kennan’s better known “The Long Telegram” in 1946. In more than 5,000 words, Kennan outlined the strategy of “containment” of the Soviet Union the US government was to adopt as the corner stone of its Cold War policies, which contributed to the eventual collapse of communist rule four decades later.

Using 26,000 words, The Longer Telegram urges the US to do the same to China in a time frame of 30 years: by 2050, it envisages, the US and its allies will “continue to dominate the regional and global balance of power”; President Xi Jinping will have been “replaced by a more moderate party leadership”; and the Chinese people will come to “question and challenge the Communist Party’s century-long proposition that China’s ancient civilisation is forever destined to an authoritarian future”.

03:05

Biden calls China the ‘most serious competitor’ to the US, in his first foreign policy address

It is no coincidence that 2050 is also the target year Xi has set for China to become a great modern socialist country, to realise the “Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and to restore China as a global power.

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