By Tom Fowdy
As reported by CNN, "Beijing announced a swath of measures against the United States and its firms on Wednesday, in what it described as retaliation against recent moves by Washington targeting Chinese companies." The US measures, as stated in the previous article, had involved blacklisting Chinese firms accusing them of participating in Uyghur forced labour schemes in the Xinjiang autonomous region, of which is utilised by America as a means to supply chain exclusion.
As a result, Beijing responded by targeting "multiple American entities, including a biotech and a resource analytics firm, and tightening export controls on drones and their related components and technologies to the US." The mutual tit for tat comes even as Chinese leader Xi Jinping prepares to officially visit the United States, which shows how paradoxically relations in some aspects are stabilised whereas economic competition continues unabated.
China's willingness to take countermeasures against the US, however, is largely a new phenomenon over the past year, one which it was not willing to do in previous years. In years past, Washington could impose all kinds of measures on Beijing, which would draw its protest, but never undertake any kind of clear strategic retaliation. This poses the question, why has China got tougher, more precise and confident in its dealings with the US? And to what extent does this keep Donald Trump in check?
In past years, even as the US became increasingly hostile to China, Beijing's own response to the United States was to exert official restraint on the belief that the relationship with Washington could be salvaged. If there were countermeasures, they were symbolic so to speak, rather than having economic "teeth" such as for example banning hostile politicians from the country. While Beijing has always been willing to initiate countermeasures against smaller nations, such as Lithuania, for crossing red lines, it nonetheless actively avoided solid countermeasures against Washington on the premise that stabilizing the relationship more in its interest than cultivating an acceleration in Cold War antagonism and "decoupling", which was pushed extremely aggressively by the Mike Pompeo State Department.
As a result, in 2020-2021, China exerted "strategic patience" against the US. It anticipated that Trump would lose the election, that his administration's policy was merely a deviation from the norm, and that Biden (big mistake here) known well by Beijing in the past, would initiate a "course correction" and relations could be repaired. This didn't happen. Instead, Biden embraced Trump's legacy, even if not as uncouthly, and advanced geopolitical confrontation on all fronts with an increasing dynamic, with events such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine effectively rewriting the global paradigm. As such, the Biden administration aggressively increased tensions over Taiwan and the South China Sea.
It was during this time, particularly with Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, and the infamous "spy ballon" incident" that China realised attempting to appease or "diplomatically cool" Washington was in vain. Hostility from Washington towards the US was not a Trump fad, but a new normal, and while the two countries still needed to sensibly manage this, an overhaul was needed in its foreign policy which appropriately leveraged "National power" to assert its interests. As a result, Beijing undertaken massive internal and external changes which might be described as a broader centralisation of its foreign policy, national security and strategic goals.
No longer was China's foreign policy, so to speak, just about "keeping the US cool" while hedging against it and hoping for the best from Europe, but it developed a massive "strategization" (as of course did the US itself) which sought to consolidate critical interests relating to supply chains, technology and diplomacy. China would, in other words, need to assert itself an increasingly volatile and geopolitical world and utilise every inch of leverage it has to stop its national interests being compromised.
For example, China has taken a much harder line against the western media in terms of access and narrative control, it has utilised the core chokepoints of supply chains in order to force western nations to the table and gain the upper hand in trade wars and likewise attached all diplomatic engagement as conditional to compliance on its key "sovereign issues." If a country is hostile on matters such as Taiwan, it doesn't passively tolerate it, it relates with a spectrum of economic and diplomatic disengagement. While some can note China has always done this to some degree, even if not to the US, the key point is how the "precision" and "sharpness" of China's response has improved. It is no longer simple "lashing out" so to speak, which is destructive and not strategically beneficial, but has real "teeth" to it. In other words, China has become surgical in its retaliations.
As a result, Beijing has been able to squeeze concessions out of Donald Trump and has shown that it does not "blink" in the face of his provocations, precisely because for all Washington's fiery rhetoric, economic interdependence between the two countries ultimately remains desirable to a degree, and the US appears to have reached this implicit understanding following the fanaticism of the Pompeo State Department years. The US is not an untouchable juggernaut that ought to be appeased for the sake of prosperity, but a competitor in an increasingly geopolitically insecure and fraught world. China has adapted, and is willing to throw punches back where it hurts, even as the two countries cordially commit to dialogue.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
Read more articles by Tom Fowdy:
Opinion | Understanding 'forced labour' claims are about supply chain dominance, not ethics
Opinion | Behind the US-Saudi deal and the attempt to 'remake' the Middle East
Opinion | China's DUV leap shows it is assembling the semiconductor supply chain piece by piece
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