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The U.S. can’t treat China the ‘same way’ it treated the
Soviet Union, warns Asian leader
(Singaporean Ministry
of Communications and Information)
NEW YORK — President
Trump may be distracted by the pitched political battle over his possible
impeachment, but he’s still locked in a far larger war.
At the dais of the U.N.
General Assembly this week, Trump renewed his attacks on
China, decrying Beijing’s “economic model dependent on massive market
barriers, heavy state subsidies, currency manipulation, product dumping,
forced technology transfers and the theft of intellectual property and also
trade secrets on a grand scale.”
In a briefing with reporters,
Trump suggested that the increased pressure of his trade war was costing
China jobs and sending Chinese supply chains “to hell.” The two countries
are preparing for the next round of talks in October, with the threat of
new U.S. tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods
still hanging over proceedings. Trump welcomed recent Chinese moves to
increase purchases of U.S. agricultural products but probably won’t relent
on tougher U.S. demands over how China administers its economy.
“You know they want to
make a deal and they should want to make a deal,” Trump said, indicating
that he believed the United States has the upper hand. “The question is: Do
we want to make a deal?”
For their part, the
Chinese cautioned Trump from pushing too hard. “Seventy years on, it is
important for the United States to avoid picking another misguided fight
with the wrong country,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi said
at a business event in Manhattan, referring to the advent of the
communist People’s Republic in 1949. He said the United States had little
reason to see China as a rival superpower and claimed his government had
“no intention to play the game of thrones on the world stage.”
Singaporean
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong is hoping cooler heads will prevail.
But he’s not sure they will. Both China and the United States “have
hardened their positions,” Lee said in an interview with Today’s WorldView
this week. He suggested the maximalist view of the dispute —
seeing the tensions as “a conflict between two systems, almost two
civilizations” — seems prevalent and is “very worrying” for the world.
“This is not a struggle
which can end up with one loser and one winner,” said Lee.
“You wanted an open-door
policy on the Chinese,” Lee said, gesturing to a rosier period in Sino-U.
S. relations. “Now, if the U.S. does not want an open-door policy anymore,
where is your part of the world, and who will be in your system?” Lee
asked. All of the United States’ partners and allies “are so deeply
enmeshed with the Chinese,” he argued, that forcing them to “disentangle”
from Beijing would be “a very challenging strategic stance to take.”
For Lee, whose country
does roaring business with China and maintains close military and economic
ties with the United States, the situation is “sad” and “troublesome.” He
worries the hostility toward Beijing that’s widespread among the American
foreign policy establishment is “overblown” and could become a
“self-validating narrative,” deepening a climate of tensions that some
analysts already cast as the 21st century Cold War.
“I think it is very
unlikely that you can treat the Chinese the same way that you treated the
Soviet Union,” Lee warned, referring to decades of an official American
policy of Soviet containment. “Even in the case of the Soviet Union from
1946, when you had George Kennan, to 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, it was
40-something years before their system collapsed.” He added that “the
Chinese have looked at the Soviet example. They studied it minutely and are
absolutely determined not to go in that direction.”
But
the Singaporean leader argued the Chinese, too, ought to reconsider their
approach. China needs to recognize it’s no longer the enfeebled nation
wronged by 19th-century European colonial powers or even the waking giant
that was brought into the World Trade Organization in 2001.
“They have to take
their share of responsibility upholding and supporting the global system,”
he said. “That requires a reset of their status, a reset of their mind-set
to know that while they may not be a fully developed country yet, they
already have to take on responsibilities and make adjustments which may
well be politically difficult to do, but are necessary if they are going to
live peacefully and to be seen as a constructive player in the world.”
But Lee also recognized
that neither Trump nor Chinese President Xi Jinping have much room to
maneuver. Trump wants a fundamental rebalancing of the U.S. relationship
with Beijing and won’t want to concede much to Chinese negotiators amid a
reelection campaign. Xi, meanwhile, is grappling with a slowdown and “very
difficult structural problems within the economy,” said Lee. The political
unrest in Hong Kong — and other challenges to “internal cohesion,” as Lee
delicately put it, including the detentions of possibly millions of Turkic
Muslim minorities in the far-western region of Xinjiang — further
complicate matters for Beijing.
Lee
Kuan Yew, Lee’s late father and Singapore’s founding leader, was widely
admired by a generation of political elites elsewhere as a venerable 20th-century statesman
and a clear-eyed thinker on
world affairs. Now, his son wants to see “statesmanship,
consistency, perseverance and wisdom” from both the Americans and Chinese,
though he’s circumspect about the present ability of either side to find a
shared “modus vivendi.”
“I think, from
America’s point of view, you will be right to conclude they are not going
to become like you,” Lee said. “But on the other hand, you have to ask
yourself: Is it better for them to be like this and quite powerful, or is
it better for them to be like they were when, during the days of Mao
[Zedong], when they were much less prosperous or powerful but much more
hostile and troublesome?”
“You have to find the
right combination of pressure and negotiation, of action and talk, which
will lead to a calibrated and constructive outcome,” Lee advised. “It
cannot just be maximum pressure and hope for total collapse of the other
party. It will not happen.”
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