Since the high-level U.S.-China Alaska talks, Beijing has been making a lot of diplomatic moves. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi first hosted visiting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Guilin and issued a joint statement by the two foreign ministers against the West. He then traveled to the Middle East, where he signed a 25-year package of economic and security cooperation agreements with Iran in Tehran. China will invest in Iran’s infrastructure projects. In exchange, Beijing will receive Iran’s oil supplies. The two sides will also deepen military cooperation, including weapons development and intelligence sharing.
Observers note that Beijing also appears to be actively building an alliance of authoritarian states as the U.S. Biden administration unites Western allies in a joint response to the Chinese Communist challenge. President Biden has called this the 21st century battle between democracy and autocracy. Can a Communist-led coalition of authoritarian states actually take shape? Will it accelerate the world into a new Cold War? What will be the winning formula for the U.S.-led Western democracies to win this new Cold War?
According to Ye Yaoyuan, associate professor of international studies and chair of the Department of International Studies and Contemporary Languages at the University of St. Thomas, the pattern of a new Cold War is taking shape, with the dividing line between the U.S.-led liberal democracies and the CCP-led non-democracies, especially as human rights issues in Xinjiang have led to tensions between the CCP and the EU.
This new Cold War situation, where the alliance between the US, the EU or the Western democracies is in fact quite obvious in terms of its manifestations at this stage,” he said. In particular, the China-EU investment agreement is still definitely on hold by the EU. The process of shelving or the sanctions imposed by the EU on the Chinese Communist Party on human rights issues, to some extent, reveals that there are macro differences in the values of democracy, freedom and human rights between the two countries. Under such differences, the core point of the CCP’s strategy is that, if we look at the economic data, the CCP’s reliance on export trade is decreasing year by year. But this decline does not mean that the CCP can consume the excess capacity with its domestic demand market at this stage. If this excess capacity is not consumed, it will still have to find ways to make alliances with other countries. These countries, of course, may be countries with ideological similarities to the CCP, and at this point we see that Russia, North Korea, and Iran are already in contact with the CCP. The core of these contacts is how to establish a set of alliances with the Chinese Communist Party, whether through the Belt and Road, or through these same values. By using alliances, at least on economic and security issues, these countries can be tied closer to the CCP.”
Xia Ming, a professor of political science at the City University of New York, said the Communist Party’s efforts to bring Iran, Russia and North Korea together are more symbolic than practical, and far less effective than military alliances such as the U.S.-led NATO and the U.S.-Japan alliance.
He said, “A fundamental question is whether these multiple organizations have their cohesive power. The West as a community of democratic values, it has a democratic consensus, it has its cohesion. But the authoritarian state is often a garbage can concept, not democratic are put in the authoritarian inside. But there are different kinds of dictatorships. For example, Iran, like Tehran, is a theocratic state, and there are certainly some conflicts and differences between the theocratic state and the Chinese Communist Party, including the persecution of Islam by the Chinese Communist Party. Russia is a non-liberal democracy, it has elections and opposition parties, but it really has no liberal rights. It also faces a crossroads in the process of democratization. That is, Russia is facing a post-strongman era of Putin, and it may also go back to the direction of democracy again, or it may move closer to the European Union. So I think for the Chinese Communist Party, the biggest problem with many of the systems it has penetrated is its different branches, its uncertainty. So to what extent it can use them, I believe it has its own doubts. So none of its alliances are military alliances created by the United States of Western countries. Not like NATO, not like the U.S. and Japan, not like the U.S. (countries), Australia (Australia), New (Zealand).”
A recent Wall Street Journal article reported that “Biden’s China policy dilemma is how to respond to the Chinese Communist Party’s judgment of U.S. decline.” The article points out that the greatest danger in the current U.S.-China relationship is the danger that the Chinese Communist Party will overestimate the extent of U.S. declining power and act accordingly. And noted American columnist Thomas Friedman also published an article in the New York Times, suggesting that the Chinese Communist Party may no longer respect the United States and that this judgment is based on a sense of pride and arrogance.
Ye Yaoyuan of the University of St. Thomas points out that the CCP’s overestimation of its own power is costing it. It has led directly to the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy and the coalition of allies against the Communist Party.
He said, “The Chinese Communist Party, at this stage, has completely misjudged the matter. This misjudgment will lead to a very profound misjudgment on the part of the Chinese Communist Party, which is simply that it may have entered into this misjudgment too early and given up on communicating with the United States on a reciprocal basis or on a peaceful basis too early. This may in fact be a major blow to the Chinese Communist Party, and to some extent it shows that at this stage the U.S. has an anti-China policy. In other words, the U.S. can understand China’s miscalculation, and under the premise of such a miscalculation, of course, the U.S. does not want to create a loophole between the U.S. and China, either in diplomatic exchanges or in the window of dialogue. Because this loophole can easily produce misunderstanding between each other. This misunderstanding will probably end up elevated to a higher level of conflict situation. From the U.S. perspective, since the Chinese Communist Party has misunderstood one of the U.S. conditions, and since the Chinese Communist Party is actually somehow unwilling to engage in a dialogue with the U.S. under various possibilities and conditions of cooperation, then under such conditions, we can see that the current U.S. attitude toward China, or its policy toward China, the whole Greater Indo-Pacific Strategy plus a new Cold War situation, can be said to be the U.S. response to China’s response to the miscalculation.”
Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the CCP, also made the judgment that “the East is rising and the West is falling,” basically believing that the United States and the West are in decline and that the CCP is facing an important period of historical opportunity.
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