Last month, top Chinese diplomats and Biden’s new administration diplomats, finally met in Alaska, USA. The Chinese diplomat’s scolding display left the world in awe.
Yang Jiechi, a professional diplomat who has always been gentle and elegant, suddenly disregarded diplomatic etiquette and showed his teeth and claws, accusing the United States in language full of bravado, insults and grandstanding, saying that the U.S. side was provoking disputes by making unjustified attacks on China’s domestic and foreign policies. He said that the United States is not qualified to talk to China from above, the Chinese do not eat this, you better mind your own business, your old habits should be changed, etc. This has caused great consternation among U.S. and Chinese observers. What is the purpose of Yang’s perverse performance? Is it a message to a nationalistic Chinese public, or is it an attempt to show the world that China is now on par with the U.S. and can compete with it?
Perhaps it is for both reasons. In fact, behind Yang Jiechi’s performance, the chief director should be Xi Jinping. It can be said that Xi Jinping’s series of new statements on U.S.-China relations launched in recent months directly brewed a new crisis in U.S.-China relations.
Let’s take a look at a few of Xi’s new claims about U.S.-China relations. The first new claim is that China has been able to level the playing field with the United States. In a panel discussion at the National People’s Congress in March, Xi said that “China can already look at the world” and that the “world” refers first and foremost to the United States. The second new statement is about the rise of the East and the fall of the West. At the end of last year, Xi urged Chinese officials to “recognize the general trend of rising in the east and falling in the west, the stark contrast between China’s rule and the West’s chaos. The third new statement, that “time and trend” are on the side of the CCP, was made on January 11, 2021, when Xi Jinping revisited the idea of “the unprecedented changes of the century” at the Party School of the Communist Party of China and stressed that “time and trend “The Chinese Communist Party is on the side of the Chinese Communist Party and should “dare to struggle” and so on.
These new statements by Xi Jinping on U.S. relations are, in my view, full of a series of wishful thinking and misjudgments. The first is the misjudgment about “rising east”. Xi grossly overestimates China’s rising power, believing that the global pandemic provides the CCP with the ambition and opportunity to seek global hegemony. Xi also underestimated China’s domestic problems. As I mentioned in my article “The Negative Population Growth Trap May Become a Super Black Swan for China’s Rise,” China’s precipitous population decline will have a serious negative impact on China’s rise. Under this premise, it will not be easy for China to maintain an annual growth rate of 5%. What’s more, Xi’s lifetime tenure could allow any major decisions or misjudgments he makes to have serious consequences that would be difficult to correct.
Second, Xi Jinping’s “western descent” is also fraught with misjudgment. China dares to speak out in front of the U.S. because it believes that its power is already on par with that of the U.S. They openly ridiculed the U.S. for its serious epidemic, political division and paper tiger, its failure to represent the international community, its loss of confidence in the democratic election system and its massacre of African-Americans. They argue that the trend of U.S. decline is accelerating its evolution, which has greatly weakened U.S. international status and influence, and that the U.S.-led globalization system is coming to an end. Xi also misjudged Biden, believing that he would be different from Trump, and therefore pinned his hopes on the Biden administration to change course. This clearly does not understand that the Biden administration’s actions to counter China actually have a high bipartisan consensus in Washington.
Then again, Xi’s judgment of the IHR was dead wrong. The Chinese side originally thought that the China-EU Comprehensive Investment Agreement (CIA), which China and the EU had spent years trying to reach, would be a nail in the coffin for the EU’s self-interest and the attractiveness of the Chinese market, but the EU ironically joined the US, UK and Canada in condemning China’s human rights problems in Xinjiang and abandoned the Agreement. The Chinese authorities were furious and immediately announced sanctions against 10 individuals and four entities in Europe, setting off a chain reaction in various EU countries. The Europeans sanctioned by China said they fought for human rights and were honored by the sanctions, saying, “The EU is about values and principles, both within the EU and globally.” The Chinese side clearly made a mistake.
The Chinese Communist Party misjudged the “eastward rise” and the “westward fall”, and misjudged the European awareness of human rights and the international human rights alliance. Clearly, the director general Xi Jinping is making a strategic mistake.
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