Following President Joe Biden‘s recent public statement that he would prevent China from catching up with the United States and emphasizing that U.S.-China relations are a competition between democracies and authoritarian regimes, former U.S. Defense Secretary Gates said this Monday that being tough on China has now become a bipartisan consensus in the United States and the Biden Administration may have to continue this policy direction.
Before last year’s U.S. election, many critics pointed out that once Democratic candidate Biden was elected, he would relax the tough policy toward China that the Trump administration has pursued in recent years, and the U.S. would inevitably revert to the appeasement policy toward China that was in place years ago. But Biden sent a clear signal at his first presidential press conference last week that he will not continue to tolerate the Chinese Communist Party‘s perverse moves to ignore international norms: “There will be fierce competition between the two countries, but we demand that China abide by international rules, including fair competition, fair practices, fair trade and so on.”
In a discussion held Monday at the Johns Hopkins University School of International Relations (SAIS), former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates also offered a series of views on trends in U.S.-China relations from political, historical and academic perspectives.
Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Gates said on March 29, 2021 that being tough on China has now become a bipartisan consensus in the United States, and the Biden administration may have to continue this policy direction.
Gates: Hard to grasp the scale of toughness with China
Gates spoke of how the tone and substance of U.S.-China relations have changed dramatically in recent years: Communist Party leader Xi Jinping has done what almost no one else has been able to do, and that is to drive a rare bipartisan consensus between Democrats and Republicans that Washington should take an extremely tough stance against the Communist Party. Thus, one of the major challenges of Biden’s tenure will be to get the scale of his China Policy right.
He noted, “I don’t think Congress will be able to veto these bills if they pass tougher sanctions against China that don’t seem wise to Biden.”
Shortly before Biden’s first presidential press conference, U.S. and Chinese officials had just held tit-for-tat high-level talks in Alaska. At the meeting, Secretary of State Blinken emphasized that the Chinese Communist Party’s actions against Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan, cyber attacks on the United States and economic coercion against its allies threaten the global order based on international rules.
After a brief opening statement by the U.S. representative, Yang Jiechi, the highest-ranking Chinese diplomat and head of the CPC Central Committee’s Foreign Affairs Working Committee Office, spent more than 10 minutes refuting the U.S., noting that the U.S. side was “not qualified” to criticize China. The talks are widely seen as a sign that the Chinese Communist Party is no longer content to respond passively to the U.S.’s hard-line stance, but is now willing to take the initiative.
Biden promises not to let the Chinese Communist Party dominate
But Biden stressed at a recent press conference that he would not let the CCP claim hegemony: “China’s overall goal is to become the global leader, the richest and most influential country in the world. That won’t happen on my watch because the United States will continue to grow and develop.”
Gates, a former top U.S. defense official, said Yang Jiechi’s heated rhetoric was largely “an act,” and that his only real audience was Xi Jinping in Beijing.
Talking about Xi’s world view, Gates said, “I think Xi and his cronies do believe that the United States is in decline, that China’s Time has come, and that they hold a lot of big cards that they can play.”
Gates, a 77-year-old Republican politician, is a longtime participant and observer of China policy. He spent more than two decades in the U.S. intelligence community at the end of the last century, at one point serving as deputy national security adviser and director of central intelligence. he became secretary of defense in 2006 under George W. Bush Jr. and continued in that role during Obama’s first term.
Gates noted that he believes the two countries should maintain an open dialogue to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings. But when asked how the U.S. and China should improve trust in each other, Gates said, “The word ‘trust’ shouldn’t be used to describe relations between countries; I think more important and easier to reach are ‘reliability’ and ‘predictability. Countries should expect each other to honor previously signed agreements …… and major powers should not take actions that catch each other off guard.”
It is easy to see that Gates’ remarks were aimed at the Chinese Communist Party. U.S. policy makers on China generally believe that the CCP has failed to deliver on previous promises made to the international community from time to time in recent years, which has seriously damaged the credibility of the authorities in Beijing.
At the press conference, Biden also said the U.S.-China contest is not just a competition between two countries, but a clash between two very different political systems: “It’s a contest between the practicality of democracy and dictatorship in the 21st century ……, and that’s what’s at stake. We have to prove that democracy works.”
According to Gates, one of the greatest advantages the United States has over China is that it has trusted allies. He said, “One of the big differences between the U.S. and China is that we have real allies, whereas the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t have real allies, they only have subordinate states.”
He said bluntly that the U.S. and China will undoubtedly remain in a long-term competitive relationship.
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