The U.S. Can’t Afford to Demonize China – Foreign Policy

/the-u-s-cant-afford-to-demonize-china

  • The U.S. Can’t Afford to Demonize China – Foreign Policy
    https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/29/the-u-s-cant-afford-to-demonize-china

    The relationship between Beijing and Washington is collapsing fast, to everyone’s detriment.

    The United States and China’s lengthy track record of constructive engagement is disintegrating at an alarming rate, requiring a major correction by both sides. Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s occasional talk of his “truly great” connection with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Xi’s constant references to “win-win” outcomes all round, recent policies and actions — especially on the U.S. side — have created an enormously destructive dynamic in the relationship.

    In the case of the United States, this dynamic is most clearly driven by excessively critical, often hostile, authoritative U.S. strategy documents such as the recently issued National Security and National Defense Strategies, similar statements by senior U.S. officials, and U.S. economic policy shifts — including grossly ill-conceived tariffs — that all envision Beijing as a “revisionist” power that threatens all Americans hold dear.

    American journalists reinforce this dim view of U.S.-Chinese relations. Almost daily, pundits unveil new aspects of China’s perfidy, ranging from Chinese attempts to undermine intellectual freedom at U.S. universities to China’s sinister debt traps designed to ensnare and control developing countries.

    This steady drumbeat of criticism assumes that every Chinese gain comes at American expense, and that past U.S. policymakers and experts have long overlooked the hostility of the Chinese regime. These critics conclude that any cooperation with China must take a back seat to the imperative of pushing back against the growing threat through all means possible. This hyperbole often reaches stratospheric heights, as Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin wrote last December:

    Washington is waking up to the huge scope and scale of Chinese Communist Party influence operations inside the United States, which permeate American institutions of all kinds. China’s overriding goal is, at the least, to defend its authoritarian system from attack and at most to export it to the world at America’s expense.