Case History
When evaluating the subject of
U.S./China relations, the agents may seem apparent, but such a list is clearly
dependent on the theoretical perspective. As complicated as the dynamics
between the United States and China have become over the past half century,
when examining them through the lens of neoliberalism/globalization, we must
incorporate economic and security factors and international
organizations/alliances affected by them. Standing prominently in this
discussion are the World Trade Organization (WTO) of which China has recently
become a member and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), of which the U.S. more
recently denounced the possibility of joining. Both states are also permanent
members of the United Nations Security Council, granting them each veto power
over all council resolutions while ensuring they will both maintain a cursory
level of diplomacy. Also relevant is the small nation of Taiwan, whose
sovereignty or lack thereof is a standing issue between the two primary actors.
Within this framework, the primary
actors share some broad yet conflicting interests. As self-interested hegemonic
powers, the U.S. and China each strive for national security and economic
stability. They both exercise expansionist economic policies with the objective
of establishing a semblance of control over the markets in which they
participate while still promoting active involvement from less influential
actors. The U.S. has expanded its reach through trade agreements such as the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, potentially to be superseded by
USMCA) and active involvement in the WTO, while China has leveraged its
superiority over and accessibility to the Third World or Global South states in
Africa and southeast Asia to implement its Belt and Road Initiative in which it
finances infrastructure improvements in the impoverished nations in exchange
for economic cooperation.
The approaches of the two nations
regarding national security are stark contrasts that may best be described as
realist v. liberal as the U.S. maintains a public cooperative presence within
the borders of countless global allies while China is militarily internalized
and self-sufficient with alliances predominantly paternal, as they exert their
strength to steer the policies of other states. This contrast is likely
attributable to a combination of leadership preference, geographic necessity,
and the age of the respective government systems of the U.S. and China, as the
former has been building a global presence for centuries, while the latter’s
relationships have only been significantly forged in the post-World War II era.
The conflicts arising from this
relationship dynamic are primarily economic, as each strives to balance against
the other. As the preeminent hegemon, the U.S. exercises policies that work to
corral the expansionist objectives of China, beginning with major
economic/security alliances with neighboring Pacific states such as Japan,
South Korea, and Australia and continuing with the implementation of
ever-increasing tariffs.
From an economic perspective, the
modern history between the two states begins in 1972, when Richard Nixon
traveled to China to establish a relationship with Chairman Mao Zedong and open
a dialogue regarding difficult issues like Taiwan through the Shanghai
Communiqué. This ultimately led to the U.S.’s One China policy—recognizing
Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan—that was established in 1979 by President Jimmy
Carter and the Taiwan Relations Act signed that same year sustaining relations
with Taiwan without violating the aforementioned policy.
The next leap in relations came in
2000, when Bill Clinton signed the U.S.-China Relations Act, establishing a
permanent normal trade partnership and paving the way for China to join the WTO
the next year. In 2008, the two economic dependence between the two states
reached a new level when China became the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt.
Possibly to counter this leverage, in 2011, the U.S. announced a policy pivot
toward Asia and a preliminary agreement with eight other nations to establish
the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Relations remained stable until the
election of President Donald Trump, who has demonstrated an ignorance and
general aversion to international diplomacy. He first endangered the U.S./China
relationship by inadvertently recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign state, but
quickly corrected course in February 2017 by affirming the One China policy.
President Trump later began exercising his authority to implement tariffs for
diplomatic reasons, most notably targeting Chinese imports in March 2018.
Fourteen months later, the announcement was made that these tariffs would be
dramatically increased.
Case
Analysis
While the recent history of
U.S./China relations stands as a mostly positive development when viewed through
the lens of neoliberal and globalist theories, key problems have continued to
arise in a seemingly dialectic pattern. The environment within which these
issues perpetuate is best explored with respect to the two primary states and
the major economic and diplomatic partnerships that relate to the U.S. and
China if a solution is going to be deemed necessary and accordingly proposed as
required.
Given their hegemonic status,
determining the affected economic parties in the analysis could fairly be
expanded to the global level, but a sufficiently robust discussion is possible
through the inclusion of the primary agents already introduced: the U.S.,
China, the WTO, the UN, and the TPP.
Since World War II, the U.S. has been
building global relationships and institutions to stabilize diplomatic
relations and prevent further global conflict while also establishing stronger
economic ties with other states. As one of the two key agents, they feature
prominently in the conflicts arising from the relationship, having served as a
foundation for the international agencies influencing or affected by the two
states and from the dually cooperative/combative relationship with China.
Within the historical discussion, the
U.S. has seemed to have been the continuous pursuer of improved and increased
ties with China, striving to establish a unilateral relationship that could be
broadened to incorporate China into the modern international community. Based
on the current situation, succeeding in this objective has allowed China to
partially transcend this dynamic and establish themselves as an economic
hegemon.
Since the establishment of the
People’s Republic of China in 1949, China has been working to establish its
international presence following decades of domination by Japan. Their initial
diplomatic efforts guide them into a partnership with the fellow communist
state of USSR—also a UN security council permanent member—but that relationship
collapsed over ideological differences in 1969, opening the door to a new and
comprehensive economic and diplomatic relationship with the U.S.
By eschewing the Soviet model of
communist economics and opening relations for capitalist trade partnerships,
China has brilliantly leveraged their relationship with the U.S., which has
opened the door to the international community and the direct influence it
allows. Likely the critical moment in the development of China’s economy
occurred when they became members of the WTO in 2001 after finally having
normalized their trade relationship with the U.S. in the year previous.
As the preeminent international trade
alliance, members of the WTO accounted for roughly 96% of total global trade in
2005.[i] With such an overwhelming
share of the global market, any state caught outside this network is doomed to
struggle economically, and as an original member of the organization, the U.S.
is capable of serving as a conduit to membership for other states seeking
accession.[ii] With China’s pursuit of
global relevance and the U.S. desire to stabilize their presence in Asia after
years of violent conflict in Korea and Vietnam, the WTO and its predecessor,
the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade from 1947, served as the most
suitable vehicle to carry the two UN members to their destination.
The establishment of a strong trade
relationship between the U.S. and China first required some semblance of
diplomacy, which had existed prior to World War II, but was compromised by the
civil war in China that ended in 1949. Despite this, the ties were still
loosely bound by the membership of both states in the United Nations, which had
been founded in 1945. As an organization, the UN was formed to replace the
failed League of Nations and serve as an international diplomatic body
providing a level of cooperation that would hopefully prevent another violent
global conflict. As the diplomatic relationship between the two states
continually strengthened over the decades, so went their economic relationship
to the point that “Made in China” has become a pejorative retort by U.S.
residents. This rapid expansion of Chinese participation in global trade and
manufacturing established them as a rival economic hegemon to the U.S. similar
in scale to that of the Cold War U.S.S.R.’s military hegemon, illustrating not
only a dynamic power shift in in Eurasia, but an equally dynamic shift in
global philosophy, establishing economics as the dominant measure of real
power.
China’s rise to power and subsequent
hegemony has allowed them some independence from and influence over U.S. policy
decisions as the two states become ever-increasingly intertwined economically
and China becoming the largest U.S. creditor. As a means of countering this
growing reliance, the U.S. shifted its focus to other states in the Pacific,
working to establish the Trans-Pacific Partnership with eleven other
prospective members. This agreement would allow the U.S. to reestablish itself
in a position of economic dominance over China by shifting some of the
manufacturing and export to other member states. This would also curb the expansion
of Chinese influence by establishing a firm U.S. foothold in the region and
freeing the neighboring states from their dependence on China’s economic
strength.
Throughout this period of economic
and diplomatic advancement between the two states, the relationship has been
quietly and continuously strained by the diplomatic ties between the U.S. and
Taiwan, over which China claims sovereignty. Formally, the U.S. adheres to the
One China policy and does not recognize Taiwan or its leadership, but it engages
with the nation independently of China, as does the WTO. As China’s influence
has grown, so has the focus on this issue in global politics, as they become
more assertive in steering the global dialogue on diplomacy.
Returning to the dialectical model,
U.S./China relations are currently in antithesis following the 2016 U.S.
Presidential election. Under the guidance of Peter Navarro—a prominent critic
of Chinese expansion and influence—Donald Trump has taken extensive measures to
weaken the relationship between the two states through elaborate public
denunciations of Chinese policies and the establishment of economically
irresponsible tariffs that he believes will provide the leverage he willingly
sacrificed by formally withdrawing the U.S. from the TPP which took effect in
December 2018 after Australia became the sixth member to ratify the agreement.[iii]
Further complicating the narrative is
China’s continued economic expansion through their Belt and Road Initiative,
which has been weakly denounced by the U.S. government without any subsequent
action taken. In a world with a U.S.-led TPP, this initiative would appear as a
simple counter to a clear attempt to curb Chinese influence, as two hegemons
continued to wrestle for dominant influence over global policy, but under the
current circumstances, China is simply acting as a diplomatic force in Asia and
Africa as they leverage their rapidly growing wealth to fertilize their budding
international authority.
Adhering to tenets of post-1989
neoliberalism, the U.S. and China have shown an adherence to self-interested
policies through the utilization of international institutions and globalist
trade policies for most of their modern diplomatic history. However, present
issues between the two states contradict the myth that “neoliberalism is the
end of history, and we are there,” and China’s continued governance under
one-party rule suggests a notable limitation of the neoliberal perception that
economics driving politics leads to harmonious political processes like democracy
in economically dominant states. Despite China’s authoritarian nature,
globalization’s ability to spread economic and cultural liberalism has not been
notably curbed, as they serve as the dominant market for the U.S. multimedia
industry and contain an expansive and vibrant consumerist environment.
The solutions to the present issues
between the U.S. and China through neoliberal/globalist concepts have already
been conceived and proposed but have been dismissed by current U.S. leadership.
This perspective focuses on the value of free trade and market-based
capitalism, while the Trump administration has taken regulatory action to limit
both of those with China and the surrounding countries, while China under Xi
Xinping continues to expand its reach and influence the nature of globalization
as the only economic power willing to enter into meaningful new trade
agreements with other states and trade organizations. For the balance of power
to be reestablished and achieve the some semblance of a dialectical synthesis,
U.S. leadership will need to walk away from the isolationist policies of the
last three years and reassert the state’s authority over global economics and
diplomacy by reentering the TPP and expanding influence over the UN and the
European Union.
Conclusion
The most condemning criticism of the
U.S. relationship with China with respect to globalization rises from the
latter’s ascension to hegemonic status within four decades of the two states
establishing a new diplomatic relationship. The unilateral approach employed by
the U.S. as a means to stabilize international relations in east Asia seems
both lazy, desperate, and short sighted, as they effectively woke a sleeping
giant by granting access to international markets to an authoritarian government
with a massive and subservient population. While this allowed for rapid
economic growth and a prolonged and continuing diplomatic peace between the
U.S. and the region, the unmitigated growth of the Chinese economy has
established them as a rival hegemon that will surpass the U.S. in influence if
no course correction is taken by their leadership.
The neoliberal solution to the
problems arising from this relationship is to simply re-enter the Trans-Pacific
Partnership and allow a robust U.S.-centric and trade-friendly market to
flourish exclusive of but proximate to China to serve as a check on the
expansion of their economic influence through the Belt and Road Initiative.
While this reactionary measure was originally proposed to be precautionary,
being late to the party is still better than not being invited, and the
remaining members of the TPP would almost certainly welcome the U.S. and its
expansive market presence onto the dance floor.
Whether these or similar necessary actions are taken will likely decide whether the key problems in the U.S./China relationship are intractable or instructional, but for the relationship to shift to a predominantly cooperative model, the economically driven neoliberal spread of democracy across Asia will have to reach Beijing, as China’s artificial suppression of individual rights and economic advancement will stand as a perpetual barrier to a friendly diplomatic relationship. This was first witnessed at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and is currently being demonstrated by the ongoing situation in Hong Kong which serves as the bridge between China and the global economy and may be the epicenter of a democratic revolution. Regardless of this outcome, an unchecked Chinese hegemon may eventually topple under its own weight, but it will certainly crush countless national economies when the time comes, and the U.S. is unlikely to avoid the impact.
[i] Accession
in perspective. https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/acc_e/cbt_course_e/c1s1p1_e.htm#fnt2
Accessed 2 December 2019.
[ii] United
States of America and the WTO. https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/countries_e/usa_e.htm
Accessed 2 December 2019.
[iii] Smyth, J., & Harding, R. (2018). Trans-pacific
partnership to start in december. FT.Com, Retrieved from
https://search-proquest-com.proxybz.lib.montana.edu:3443/docview/2127491639?accountid=28148
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