The Point of No-Return?
COVID-19’s Impact on U.S.-China Relations
This is a draft of a longer-form article I am writing for an Italian geopolitical magazine called Limes. Daily COVID-19 update will be a little late today as I’ve had to work hard to finish this up. — JLS
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“Do the US and China today face threats analogous to an alien invasion – challenges so severe that both sides are compelled to work together? One does not have to stretch too far to answer affirmatively.” – Graham Allison, Destined for War, 2017.
COVID-19 is a global crisis. It afflicts humans regardless of race, creed, and nationality. The virus does not care whether its host is American, or Chinese, or Spanish, or South African. The pain of losing a loved one, the fear of leaving one’s home, the necessary and yet unnatural isolation from our communities, the economic uncertainty – these have become universal experiences in recent weeks. To COVID-19, we are all the same. Fighting COVID-19, we are all the same.
Except, as it turns out, we aren’t.
The United States and China are the twin pillars of the global economy. Together, they account for 40 percent of the world’s GDP.[1] And yet the unique and global challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic have not brought the two countries together. Instead, it has pushed them further apart. Relations between the United States and China are now at their worst since the early years of the Vietnam War, when China sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers into North Vietnam to support the Việt Cộng.[2] The world is suffering because of it, and there is likely a great deal more suffering to come.
Past Performance
The last time the world faced a truly global crisis, humanity’s nemesis was far less sinister: a bubble in sub-prime mortgage loans that led to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Cooperation between China and the United States was pivotal in restoring stability to the international financial system after the GFC, so much so that then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said, “It is clear that China accepts its responsibility as a major economy that will work with the United States and other partners to ensure global economic stability.”[3] That’s a far cry from U.S. President Donald Trump’s press conference yesterday (March 23), during which he said he was “upset with China” for its behavior in the current crisis.[4]
Indeed, there is a case to be made that if U.S.-China relations were better, COVID-19 might never have become a global pandemic in the first place. China’s initial reaction to evidence of a new virus proliferating in Wuhan was to suppress information on the disease. A Chinese doctor named Li Wenliang, who has since died from COVID-19, was one of the first to raise the alarm when he sent out a warning to other doctors and medical workers in China via social media on December 30th, 2019. Four days later, China’s Public Security Bureau forced Li to sign a letter confessing to false comments and disturbing the social order.[5] Li’s story is hardly exceptional. China suppressed information on COVID-19 in December with the same gusto that it locked down Wuhan in late-January.[6]
It is not surprising that China suppressed initial information on the outbreak in Wuhan. It probably did so without ill intent. As the Chinese proverb goes, “Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away.”[7] China is an authoritarian country with over 1 billion people living in it. Xi Jinping’s top-down leadership style means that it takes time for awareness of local problems to work its way to the top of China’s leadership structure. By January 7th, however, China knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was dealing with a new and potentially dangerous virus: it shared the news with the World Health Organization (WHO) that day.[8] The WHO and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) immediately offered to assist China in managing the epidemic – only to be rebuffed, and ultimately deceived into thinking that China had everything under control.[9]
Perhaps China would have rebuffed the WHO and the CDC even if U.S.-China relations had not deteriorated so much in recent years. It is impossible to know for sure. Clearly, however, by December 2019, China did not trust the United States enough to share information with it on the epidemic. That distrust was not unfounded. The Trump Administration has been very clear that it views China as a strategic competitor.[10] In 2018 and 2019, while African Swine Fever (ASF) was decimating China’s pork industry, the United States continued to press for trade concessions from China, including purchases of U.S. agricultural goods – in effect, using the ASF epidemic against China for American profit. On February 15, when the U.S. and China might have been working together on COVID-19, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said, “[The US] needs to focus more on high-intensity warfare going forward, and our long-term challenges are China number one.”[11]
The most maddening thing about the COVID-19 pandemic is that it was preventable. And while there are many reasons why the pandemic was not avoided, chief among them is the rot that has corrupted U.S.-China relations. If COVID-19 had been an issue 12 years ago, it would have united decision-makers in Beijing and Washington in pragmatic solidarity. In 2020, however, COVID-19 has not brought China and the US together. It has driven them apart and become a source of zero-sum competition. For years, the most important question in geopolitics has been whether the US and China can embrace competitive coexistence or whether they are destined for conflict. COVID-19 is a bitter taste of the global ramifications of the latter.
China Goes on the Offensive
The combination of the U.S.-China trade war, of U.S. suspicion of China’s global intentions, and of China’s turn to nationalism and authoritarianism all contributed to the breakdown in U.S.-China relations. But COVID-19 is no longer an issue of simple distrust between China and the US. Since successfully curbing the spread of COVID-19 in China, the Chinese government has gone on a propaganda offensive, one that leverages China’s dominance in global supply chains for implicitly political ends. This will constitute a “point of no-return” for future U.S. governments to reduce economic interdependence on China, especially in politically or strategically sensitive sectors.
Even as China was suppressing information on COVID-19’s spread, it was preparing for the worst. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, China produced half of the world’s surgical masks and respirators.[12] In January, China not only stopped selling masks – it began to buy up the world’s supply, importing 56 million respirators and masks during the first week of the lockdown in Wuhan in January alone.[13] A Canada-based mask maker, Medicom Group, said earlier in March that China was diverting supplies of materials at its factories in China in order to produce masks for use in China.[14] Worldwide, countries are experiencing shortages of masks and other important personal protective equipment because China dominates the supply chain.
China is using this position to deflect criticism about its shortcomings in dealing with COVID-19. China is even attempting to invent an image of its behavior abroad as that of a friendly country to all those in need. Whether by donating masks and COVID-19 testing equipment to Asian countries, or sending medical teams to Serbia and Italy, or medical supplies to Greece and Russia, China is creating a narrative about its own competency and resources and its willingness to use them to help other countries.[15] Like all successful propaganda campaigns, this strategy is effective because there is some truth to it: the world is dependent on China right now whether it wants to be or not, and if smiling and nodding one’s head is what it takes for political and public health officials to secure access to all-important medical equipment, they will not hesitate to kowtow.
China’s biggest weakness relative to the United States is not ultimately its military capabilities or its dependence on global trade. China’s biggest weakness relative to the US is that the world has a more favorable impression of the US than China. The US, even under a Trump Administration that has consistently put “America First,” and even after disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, has a broad network of formidable allies and, relative to China, a more favorable global reputation. By comparison, China has North Korea and not much else. A Spring 2019 Pew Research survey on global attitudes and trends showed that while global views of the U.S. are generally positive, global views of China are far more divided.[16] China is attempting to use its COVID-19 response to change that.
As China emphasizes the constructive role it is playing globally in response to COVID-19, it is also criticizing the United States. A March 21st commentary in Xinhua, for instance, declared that “Washington flunks test of responsibility in global pandemic fight.”[17] A March 23rd column in the People’s Daily advised the US to “lay down arrogant and prejudice [and] seriously face up and examine its own serious human rights issues.”[18] Perhaps most disturbing, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson has repeatedly suggested that COVID-19 might have been brought to Wuhan by the U.S. Army.[19] The U.S., for its part, has tried to label COVID-19 as a “Chinese virus” and some U.S. Senators have suggested that COVID-19 might be a Chinese biological weapon.[20] China and the US often criticize each other – but not to this extent, and not with this level of vitriol.
That is why the tit-for-tat restrictions recently placed on Chinese and American journalists is arguably the most worrying indicator of all. On February 19, China expelled three Wall Street Journal reporters because of an editorial which criticized China’s initial response to COVID-19 for being “less than impressive.”[21] A few weeks later, the US said it was limiting the number of Chinese employees in the United States that work for Xinhua, CGTN, China Radio, China Daily, and People’s Daily to 100 (about 160 were working in the US before the order).[22] A few weeks after that, China announced it was expelling all American journalists in China working for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.[23] The trend is clear: decoupling is not going to be limited to supply chains and manufacturing in the future, but to information as well. China and the US already have a difficult time understanding each other’s intentions; cracking down on journalists will only exacerbate that mutual unintelligibility.
Two Caveats
Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, China has become a dictatorship. Xi’s vision of national rejuvenation has become Beijing’s official policy.[24] As strong as Xi’s position has become, his rise to power has not been without opposition. There may be a backlash in China to the harsh line that the Chinese government is taking against the United States, especially if it leads to U.S. companies withdrawing investment and moving their operations away from China. A Radio France Internationale on March 22nd suggested that an emergency Politburo meeting might be called to “discuss where Xi Jinping is suitable to continue to hold” his position.[25] Meanwhile, China’s ambassador to the US, Cui Tiankai, told Axios that any conspiracy theory about the U.S. Army bringing COVID-19 to Wuhan was “crazy.”[26]
The U.S., for its part, may also try to improve its relationship with China in the near future. Improvement will likely not happen under the Trump Administration, which has staked too much of its credibility on taking a tougher line towards China, but the economic fall-out from COVID-19 makes President Trump’s reelection uncertain at best. With the Democratic Party settling on Joe Biden as its candidate, the possibility exists that by this time next year, a new U.S. government will take a very different policy approach towards China, one that emphasizes stability and predictability. The absence of both is the main reason China has been so unnerved by U.S. behavior under the Trump Administration, and their reemphasis could paper over some of the rifts that have appeared in the last three years.
While these are possibilities that should not be completely discounted, they may well be more indicative of wishful thinking than of prescient analysis. Even if moderating forces in both China and the US push their respective leaders to attempt to repair the bilateral relationship, the underlying forces bringing China and the US into conflict will not disappear anytime soon. And if the crisis around COVID-19 could not provide enough of a shared basis for the US and China to put aside their differences and cooperate on an issue of mutual interest, it is unclear what could.
In his highly influential 2017 book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap,” Graham Allison suggested that shared Chinese-American interests on issues like nuclear proliferation, global terrorism, and climate change might provide a more stable basis for U.S.-China relations in the future because they were issues that posed problems that neither country could solve without the other. (It is a book especially worth rereading now because Joe Biden provided one of the blurbs for the back-cover.) Allison was right that neither the U.S. nor China can solve a problem on COVID-19’s scale without the other. What Allison failed to anticipate was that neither side would want to solve the problem because of mutual distrust.
Conclusion
As an enemy, COVID-19 does not care about political borders. It is oblivious to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. It is by nature unideological. It has no history. The only way to beat COVID-19, to truly beat it, is to fight it as a species. And yet despite the global threat COVID-19 poses, China and the United States are not only failing to cooperate; their failure to cooperate is arguably what caused the pandemic in the first place. This is starkly zero-sum thinking and does not bode well for the long-term future of U.S.-China relations or for the international political system. Historians may look back at COVID-19 and remember it not just as a deadly and economically destructive pandemic, but as the moment that globalization officially died – another notch on the virus’s belt.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?most_recent_value_desc=true
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/business/worldbusiness/22iht-22paulson.17155092.html
[5] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51403795
[6] https://chinamediaproject.org/2020/01/27/dramatic-actions/
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tian_gao,_Huangdi_yuan
[8] https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronavirus-china/en/
[9] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/health/cdc-coronavirus-china.html
[10] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf
[11]
[12] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/business/masks-china-coronavirus.html
[13] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/business/masks-china-coronavirus.html
[15] http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0322/c90000-9670975.html, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-03/21/c_138902774.htm, http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0317/c90000-9668847.html
[16] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/05/people-around-the-globe-are-divided-in-their-opinions-of-china/, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/01/08/trump-ratings-remain-low-around-globe-while-views-of-u-s-stay-mostly-favorable/pg_2020-01-08_us-image_3-01/
[17] http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-03/21/c_138902999.htm
[18] http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/0323/c90000-9671210.html
[19] https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/13/asia/china-coronavirus-us-lijian-zhao-intl-hnk/index.html
[21] https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-is-the-real-sick-man-of-asia-11580773677
[22] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/world/asia/china-journalists-diplomats-expulsion.html
[23] https://www.mfa.gov.cn/web/fyrbt_673021/t1757128.shtml?from=timeline&isappinstalled=0
[24] https://geopoliticalfutures.com/defining-xis-chinese-dream/