An analysis of the U.S. Republican Party’s ultra-tough Attitude Towards China
Zhang Zhaoxi
October 20, 2021 | Source: China Institute of Contemporary International
The author is an assistant researcher at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations and the Institute of American Studies.
“The right-wing populist trend made the Republican Party’s political counterattack against the Democratic Party even more powerful in 2016. During the Trump administration, the Republican Party has further developed in a radical, conservative, and populist direction. “Patriotism” has become one of the most popular political labels for the conservative forces of the Republican Party, and they are more inclined to shape themselves as the “American Nationalist Party.”
In December 2017, the Trump administration released the National Security Strategy report, which positioned China as a “strategic competitor.”
The competitiveness of the U.S. policy toward China has greatly increased. In October 2018, then-U.S. Vice President Mike Pence delivered an unprecedentedly harsh speech on China policy at the Hudson Institute, which was seen as the starting point for the U.S. to become tougher on China in recent years. Looking at the U.S.’s stance toward China over the past four years or so, one prominent feature is that the Republican Party often appears tougher than the Democratic Party. Some Republicans even exaggerate that “China poses a more serious threat to the United States than the Soviet Union.” After the Biden administration came to power, Republicans continued to maintain a “super tough” stance toward China and constantly questioned the Biden administration’s “softness toward China.” So, how exactly does the U.S. Republican Party and the conservative forces behind it embody their “super tough” stance toward China? What factors contribute to its “super tough” stance toward China? What impact will this situation have on U.S. politics, China policy, and Sino-U.S. relations, and how should we view it? This article attempts to analyze these issues.
PART I.
For a period of time, tensions and confrontations in Sino-US relations have been highlighted, and “strategic competition” has replaced “engagement” as the key word in defining the United States’ China policy in the new stage. In this process of transformation of China policy, Republican conservative forces represented by the Trump administration have played an important role. Against the backdrop of unprecedented political polarization and rising negative sentiment toward China in the United States, the conservative Republican Party’s “super tough” stance toward China has become particularly prominent.
On the whole, in recent years, the conservative stance of the Republican Party towards China has been significantly more confrontational than that of the liberal Democratic Party, trying to fundamentally change the interaction model of Sino-US relations.
From a strategic perspective, the conservative forces of the Republican Party not only regard China as an external security challenge, but even regard China as an “existential threat.”
On the one hand, the conservative forces of the Republican Party do not shy away from using highly confrontational terms such as “enemy” and “adversary” to describe China, while the Democratic Party is relatively restrained in this regard.
In May 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing on “Smart Competition: Rethinking U.S. China Policy after 40 Years of Engagement.” One of the focus points of debate at the meeting was “How to define China.” Republican members of the House of Representatives had significantly more views on China. Confrontational. As tensions between China and the United States intensify, many Republican congressmen have begun to publicly call China an “enemy” or “strategic rival” and have criticized Biden’s previous statement that China is “not a competitor of the United States.”
On the other hand, conservative forces in the Republican Party not only believe that China challenges the international order and geopolitical interests led by the United States, but also poses a prominent threat to the domestic economic security and institutional security of the United States. For some time, conservative forces in the Republican Party have increasingly tended to elaborate on the “China threat” from a “local national perspective.”
Former Trump administration national security adviser Robert O’Brien accused “China of threatening the American democratic system.” Former Attorney General William Barr claimed in a speech related to China that “China is using economic power to try to change the United States”; during Trump’s term, the Department of Homeland Security, which used to focus on responding to domestic threats, even launched a special “Responding to China Threats” Strategic Action Plan”, which has unprecedentedly stated that China will have a “direct, obvious and profound impact on the American people, American values, and the security and prosperity of the United States.”
U.S Democrats
In contrast, although the Democratic Party is also paying more attention to the China issue, it is still looking at it from the perspective of international strategic game. For example, Antony Blinken, the Biden administration’s Secretary of State, has positioned handling relations with China as “the biggest issue in the 21st century.” geopolitical test”.
From the perspective of response strategies, the conservative forces of the Republican Party are more inclined to adopt a tough approach of “push back” towards China, minimizing contact with China, and highlighting the zero-sum game.
Pompeo, the then Secretary of State in the Trump administration, once proposed “distrust and verification” as the principle of dealing with China, that is, dealing with China from the “bottom line thinking” that presupposes that China’s behavior is “untrustworthy”, which is better than Reagan era during the Cold War. The government was even more at odds with the Soviet Union’s “trust and verification” principle of engagement.
At the government level, the Trump administration has promoted a series of competitive and even confrontational policies toward China, profoundly changing the trajectory of U.S. policy toward China and also affecting the adjustment of the Biden administration’s China policy.
In 2016, Trump won the general election as the Republican candidate and was elected as the President of the United States, starting the “America First” governance process. Promoting a comprehensive strengthening of China policy is an important issue during his term. In fact, the Republican party platform released during the 2016 presidential campaign already listed many tough propositions against China that had never been made before, such as mentioning the “six guarantees” to Taiwan for the first time, claiming that “Hong Kong’s autonomy has been weakened”, and accusing Obama administration’s lack of force in dealing with China on the South China Sea issue can be described as the precursor of the Trump administration’s tough approach to China. During the Trump era, a group of right-wing hawkish strategists played an important role in the Trump administration’s formulation of its China policy and became the intellectual booster for its tough China policy.
As a “political amateur”, Trump personally and his family had relatively limited contacts in the field of foreign affairs and security, and instead absorbed Republican conservative forces to enrich the team. Then Secretary of Defense James Mattis and National Security Advisor H.R. McMath Right-wing hawks from the military and the original Republican administration, such as Trump and John Bolton, are in charge of foreign policy.
Most of these right-wingers uphold a realist view of international strategy, value the effectiveness of national hard power, emphasize that the United States faces the so-called “big power threats” such as China and Russia, and push the Trump administration to make an overall strategic judgment that “the world has returned to great power competition era.”
Among them, former White House senior adviser Michael Pillsbury and deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger played particularly prominent roles in turning the U.S. policy toward China into a comprehensive and tough one.
Pillsbury’s argument that “China plans to secretly replace the United States” has profoundly influenced Trump’s view of China, making him “more vigilant” about China; Mr. Boming has prompted a change in the past strategic tradition of the United States regarding China’s development as “opportunities outweighing challenges” , proposed using the “Indo-Pacific” region as the “frontline” to limit the development of China’s power, laying the foundation for the subsequent introduction of the “Indo-Pacific Strategy.”
Biden Follows Trump
Many tough measures against China promoted by the conservative forces of the Republican Party have been continued by the Biden administration and constitute an essential element of the new round of US policy layout towards China.
In the economic and trade field, the Biden administration has not yet canceled the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on China, and must strengthen the maintenance of “supply chain security”; in the military field, the Biden administration established the Department of Defense’s “China Working Group” to review relevant policies after taking office. , confirmed China as the “primary security challenge” to the United States and made corresponding arrangements; on sensitive issues related to Xinjiang and Hong Kong, the Biden administration maintained the unsatisfactory decisions made by the previous government such as “genocide exists in Xinjiang” and “Hong Kong no longer has a high degree of autonomy” Make a real assessment and extend sanctions against China. Except for the possibility of strategic cooperation on certain issues such as climate change, the Biden administration has used the idea of ”strategic competition” to comprehensively guide its layout with China. The tough strategy toward China promoted by the conservative forces of the Republican Party is being inherited and solidified by the Biden administration.
At the congressional level, Republicans continue to take the lead in playing the role of “restricting China with the law” and promoting toughness against China to further become a cross-party consensus in the American political circle. The House and Senate are key positions where partisan forces exert policy influence. They are also an important platform for the Republican Party to promote a “super tough” policy toward China. For a period of time, Republicans have played a very prominent role in a series of bills targeting China introduced by the U.S. Congress. First, most of the sponsors of major tough China-related legislation in the United States in recent years have been Republicans. Taking the 116th Congress of the United States (term from January 3, 2019 to January 3, 2021) as an example, there are mainly 8 China-related bills passed by both houses of Congress in this Congress and finally signed into law by the president. The main sponsors of five of them are Republicans.
Second, some China-related bills proposed by Republicans involve more sensitive and confrontational issues. “Accountability” and “tracing of the origin” of the COVID-19 epidemic are newly emerging sensitive issues in Sino-U.S. relations, and they are also new means for the United States to exert political pressure on China. Legislative proposals related to them in the U.S. Congress are all proposed by Republicans; After the Trump administration came to power, it sent letters to important officials asking them to disclose “epidemic information” related to China, mostly led by Republicans.
Third, in recent years, most of the working mechanisms and research results in Congress that are tough on China have been dominated by Republicans.
In May 2020, Republicans in the House of Representatives established the “China Working Group”. Michael McCaul, the top Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, serves as the chairman of the working group to study and formulate various China-related legislation to deal with the “China threat”. A report was released in the fall of that year, proposing more than 400 China-related legislative proposals. In June, the “Republican Study Committee”, the largest Republican caucus group in the House of Representatives, released the strategic report “Strengthening the United States and Responding to Global Threats”. At the beginning, it listed China (the Chinese Communist Party) as the “number one threat” to the United States and claimed that it was necessary to name and sanction those Chinese officials involved in Hong Kong and Xinjiang affairs.
After the Biden administration came to power, the Republican Party, as an opposition force, continued to propose bills and proposals that highlighted its toughness on China, and often criticized the Biden administration for being “soft on China” and used China issues to attack it. In February 2021, Arkansas U.S. Senator Tom Cotton signed a report titled “Defeating China: Targeted Decoupling and a Protracted Economic War,” proposing to further tighten U.S. high-tech exports to China and achieve “Defeat China: Targeted Decoupling and a Protracted Economic War.” “Strategic decoupling”; Chairman of the House Republican Study Committee and Representative Jim Banks of Indiana issued a memorandum titled “Biden Deals with China: Bad Policies, Bad Personnel”, itemizing Biden’s comments on his predecessor after taking office.
The government’s “backsliding” on its “super tough” policy toward China and its appointed officials’ “connections” with China try to prove that “the Biden administration is destroying Trump’s victory against China” and focus on proposing the “Protecting Universities Act” and other 5 China-related bill to “protect American institutions from harms by China.” Regarding the diplomatic performance of the Biden administration during its 100th day in office, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham criticized it as “a disaster” and claimed that “China and Russia are manipulating Biden at will.”
Faced with political high pressure from the Republican Party, neither the Biden administration nor the Democrats in Congress have relaxed their stance on China policy, and being tough on China has further developed into a bipartisan policy consensus.
In April 2021, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez proposed the “Strategic Competition Act of 2021” and was initially passed. The bill claims to “embody the bipartisan will to comprehensively deal with China.” To a large extent, The above is a synthesis of the tough China-related legislation previously proposed by Republican lawmakers.
Finally, at the social level, conservative forces in the Republican Party hold negative views on China, and various conservative organizations are active in being tough on China.
Although polls show that Republicans and Republican-leaning conservatives have always had a more negative view of China than Democrats over the past 15 years, Republican conservatives’ negative views of China have increased significantly since 2020.
On the one hand, in recent years, the conservative forces of the Republican Party have become increasingly cold toward China.
Polls show that the proportion of Republicans and Republican-leaning people who feel “very cold” towards China will reach 62% in 2021, double the 31% in 2018. On the other hand, the negative views of conservative Republicans on China are in sharp contrast to those of Democrats and independents. Polls show that 53% of Republicans regard China as an “enemy”, and 64% of conservatives regard China as an “enemy”. In contrast, only 20% of Democrats and less than 20% of Liberals view China as an “enemy,” while 65% of Democrats and 71% of liberals are more likely to view China as a “competitor.” The proportion of Republicans who support tough measures against China in economic and trade and other fields Nearly twice as many as Democrats (72% vs. 37%).
In December 2020, a survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs showed that in response to the question “Seven critical threats facing the United States”, 67% of Republicans selected “China’s rise as a world power”, ranking among the threats in the eyes of Republicans On the other hand, for the Democratic Party, “China’s rise as a world power” is not even among the “seven major threats”. The above data shows that the Republican Party and Republican-leaning conservatives are a key factor in promoting the increase in negative perceptions of China in American society in recent years. They are the main force advocating a tough approach to China.
The conservative forces of the Republican Party are also actively planning and promoting many organizations and activities targeting the “China threat” in the social field. In March 2019, a group of ultra-conservative strategists such as former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and Frank Gaffney, assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration, revived Cold War-era strategies for dealing with the Soviet Union. The “Committee on Current Danger” established the “Committee on Current Danger: China” (CPDC), claiming that “like the Soviet Union in the past, China poses an existential ideological threat to the United States and the concept of freedom” and attempted to make it a “committee on current danger: China” to “educate the public about China” to defend the United States from all types of conventional and irregular threats to the United States.”
As an important component of American conservatives, the religious right, which used to focus more on domestic affairs, has also begun to join the discussion on China. In July 2020, the Falkirk Center for Faith and Freedom, an affiliate of Liberty University, an important base for American Christian evangelicals, held the first “Freedom Summit” at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., to discuss “China versus the United States” “Threats to Freedom”, a group of influential conservative politicians and opinion leaders such as Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn, Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, and Bannon Participate in the meeting to express your views on China. The Republican Party and the American conservative forces behind it are working hard to promote “strong response to China” as an ideological trend in American society.
II.
Showing strength toward China is nothing new in American politics. Since the normalization of Sino-U.S. relations in the 1970s, the U.S. strategy toward China has been adhering to a mixed model of “engagement and cooperation + prevention and containment.” It particularly hopes to make China’s economy, politics, and society more “open” through deepening contact and become “an open country” in the eyes of the United States. constructive and responsible global stakeholders”. At the same time, the United States has long had strategic misgivings about China, whose social system and foreign policy are fundamentally different from those of the United States. The U.S. Congress has long had a Congressional and Executive Commission on China to investigate so-called “negative issues related to China.”
Since the Trump administration took office, the United States has first shown strength towards China in the economic and trade fields, and then suppressed China in many fields such as political diplomacy, military, science and technology, and people-to-people and cultural exchanges, until it seriously proposed a consensus on reflection and easier “engagement” with China, and systematically We will promote the adjustment of China policy to focus on competition in a systematic and strategic manner. In this regard, some scholars interpret the changes in Sino-US relations and the adjustment of the US strategy towards China based on structural factors such as changes in the balance of power between China and the US, and see that “the US competitive China strategy is a paradigm shift.”
In this process, the “super tough” attitude toward China displayed by the Republican Party in the United States is very eye-catching, and has even led to the formation of a political landscape in which the Democratic Party competes with China to express strength against China. The reason why the Republican Party adopts a “super tough” stance toward China is not only due to the “hegemonic anxiety” caused by the relative decline of the United States’ power and status, but is also closely related to the political traditions and ecological changes within the Republican Party and American conservative forces. The Republican Party’s “super tough” posture toward China is a political strategy. It is a “culture war” promoted by the Republican Party in the field of foreign policy in order to maintain political influence and attack political opponents. The re-emergence of neoconservatism has contributed to this. The attitude and measures of the conservative forces of the Republican Party towards China no longer depend entirely on the objective operating status of Sino-US relations, but are closely linked to the domestic political struggle situation in the United States.
From the perspective of party attributes, the Republican Party is accelerating towards “nationalism” and needs to strengthen its efforts to shape China as an external opponent to demonstrate its own political characteristics.
The current political landscape of the United States was established through multiple rounds of party reorganization in history. The most recent major party reorganization occurred from the mid-to-late 1960s to the 1980s. The important result of this round of reorganization is that the cross-racial “New Deal coalition” led by the Democratic Party and based on economic interests, integrating southern whites, blacks, Jews, etc., began to disintegrate.
The influence of the “New Deal order” that had long dominated postwar American politics declined. The Southern-Midwestern conservative alliance gradually became the political base of the Republican Party and continues to this day. In the process of resisting the “New Deal order” and regaining political power, the Republican Party found a path to political renaissance, which was to exploit the public’s dissatisfaction with the liberal counterculture movement and shape itself into one based on the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. The inheritor of Juche’s “American orthodoxy” inspires people’s value recognition to gain support.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan, then the Republican presidential candidate, won the presidential election with a record 489 electoral votes, marking the climax of the modern Republican revival movement. The Republican Party during the Reagan era has basically abandoned the path of advocating moderate conservatism and emphasizing consensus politics during the Eisenhower era, and has moved towards a path that clearly demonstrates “conservative values” and is tit-for-tat with the liberals of the Democratic Party.
Since the Reagan era, the Republican Party has integrated large-scale monopoly capital, Christian right-wing, conservative intellectuals and other social forces to gradually form a huge conservative power network. It is more based on identity politics to seize the self-esteem of the white group and emphasize “us” and “others” differences, freeing attitudes towards cultural diversity and ethnic inclusion.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the Democratic Party’s Obama administration has had limited success in responding to the crisis. It has also intensified its promotion of the liberal agenda in the social and cultural fields, stimulating the sense of economic loss and anger among the majority of middle- and lower-class white people about “cultural chaos.”
This gave rise to the “Tea Party” “The right-wing populist trend made the Republican Party’s political counterattack against the Democratic Party even more powerful in 2016. During the Trump administration, the Republican Party has further developed in a radical, conservative, and populist direction. “Patriotism” has become one of the most popular political labels for the conservative forces of the Republican Party, and they are more inclined to shape themselves as the “American Nationalist Party.”
According to the main viewpoints of social psychology, shaping external threats can play a role in strengthening group identity, and is therefore an important way for political parties to condense political identity. The more the Republican Party flaunts its “patriotic” attributes, the more it needs to exaggerate external threats to back it up. American political scientist Samuel Huntington once pointed out, “We only understand who we are when we understand who we are not, and often only when we understand who we are against.” Looking back at the history of the Republican Party, whether it is Reagan’s “evil empire” theory against the Soviet Union or George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” theory against terrorism, they all reflect their deliberate exaggeration and political use of external threats.
This round of the Republican Party’s “super tough” posture toward China is a political feedback against China, the “imagined enemy”, in the context of its party’s increasingly localized and extremely conservative nature. It reflects the “American white supremacists’ face of China”. The rising counter-attack is full of groundless accusations, paranoid arrogance and ignorant arrogance.”
In terms of means of struggle, faced with an unprecedentedly polarized social and political atmosphere, it is more difficult for the Republican Party to rely on the “culture war” to gain public support, and it has instead opened up China policy as a new area of political struggle.
In the United States, the “culture war” mainly refers to the opposing value orientations and mutual attacks between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party on a series of social and cultural issues, and the resulting division of opinions and even hatred between liberals and conservatives. On the one hand, the “culture war” is a prominent social phenomenon in the United States. It initially centered on issues such as religious beliefs and family ethics, and then extended to various social issues such as gun control, abortion, and immigration. Nowadays, even wearing a mask during the epidemic is a question. It can trigger widespread public dissension in the United States. On the other hand, “culture war” also has a political function.
Its core lies in winning the recognition and support of specific groups with high-profile and tough value positions. It is a realistic manifestation of “divisive politics.” For a long time, the Republican Party has used the banner of defending “traditional values” to gather conservative forces from all walks of life in the United States. It has repeatedly made gains in the “culture war” against the liberals of the Democratic Party and has been able to expand its political influence.
However, the “culture war” is not a once-and-for-all move. The weakness of its effectiveness is that “once it is won, it will go downhill.” For the Republican Party, only by constantly exploring new issues that can cause disputes to express its stance can it continue to demonstrate its legitimacy as a representative of “Normative America.”
As the public has become unprecedentedly antagonistic on various domestic issues, it is necessary to open up external issues to supplement them. In view of the fact that the rise of China has affected all aspects of American people’s lives, the Republican Party has begun to realize the political mobilization potential contained in China issues, thereby turning the “culture war” “Push into the diplomatic and security areas that have been less involved before. The Republican Party forcibly links domestic governance issues to China to avoid political criticism. Beginning in March 2020, the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic in the United States has intensified, the economic and social operations have been seriously disrupted, and the domestic governance crisis has become prominent. In response to this, the Trump administration failed to respond and tried to shift the focus by blaming China. This political method was even used by the Republican Party as an election strategy. At the same time, the Republican Party has solidified its “super tough” stance toward China into its exclusive political label.
In recent years, the Republican Party has paid more and more attention to the political effectiveness of being tough on China, and has tried to further build toughness on China as a priority party will. During the 2020 presidential campaign, the Trump camp announced the “Second Term Governing Agenda”, in which “ending dependence on China” ranked as the third most important priority, second only to promoting employment and responding to the epidemic. Not only that, Republican agencies in Congress began to openly label “dealing with China” as an important political concern, set up legislative plans specifically targeted at China, and continued to pressure the Democratic Party to take measures after the Biden administration took office on the grounds that they were “not tough enough on China.” A more radical China policy.
From an ideological perspective, the Republican Party considers itself “capitalist orthodoxy” and tends to indirectly attack the Democratic Party and broader American liberal forces by showing its toughness on socialist China. In essence, both parties in the United States are bourgeois parties that safeguard the capitalist system and interests and do not agree with socialism or communism. However, judging from the postwar US diplomatic history, the anti-communist tendencies of the Republican Party are often more naked, radical and tough than those of the Democratic Party. This phenomenon is closely related to the ideologies of the two parties. The Republican Party has always been pro-business and pro-market, advocating laissez-faire and limited government, and is a typical representative of “market fundamentalism”; the Democratic Party advocates more “pro-active government” and social reform. As the spokesperson for “market fundamentalism”, American conservatives have a rather negative understanding of socialism and communism. “Conservatives regard communism as an armed, messianic threat to Western culture and the United States.” . In the view of many Republicans, Democratic liberals who support “big government” are closer to socialism, are more likely to “accommodate” other socialist countries, and are therefore more likely to engage in “un-American activities.” At least since the days of Roosevelt, the Republican Party has been adept at using anti-communist ideology to attack the Democratic Party.
In the early 1950s, some Republicans launched the “McCarthyism” anti-communist upsurge, which included internal affairs considerations, marking the right’s reversal of the center-left line of Roosevelt’s “New Deal.” reactionary. In recent years, anti-communist sentiment has been making a comeback in the United States. In 2019, Trump claimed in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly: “One of the most serious challenges facing all countries is the ghost of socialism…The United States can never become a socialist country.” Currently, the Republican Party advocates a “super tough” stance towards China Republican hawkish politicians such as Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley have deep anti-communist tendencies and are at the forefront of partisan struggles. They have not only proposed numerous anti-China bills, but have also repeatedly preached that “socialism has been established in the Democratic Party.” “Rise within” and “Democrats are all socialists.” In their view, a strong response to China, hostility to communism, and opposition to the Democratic Party have the same ideological orientation, and the three are inseparable.
From the perspective of ideological origin, the Republican Party has a long-standing neoconservative tradition of advocating unilateral toughness and believing in “strength determinism” in the field of foreign policy. The revival of this tradition in recent years has also helped the Republican Party move towards being “super tough” on China.
The move toward neoconservatism was an important political transformation experienced by the conservative forces of the American Republican Party after World War II. Faced with the long-term dominance of social politics by Democratic liberals after the war, it was the emergence of neoconservatism that helped the Republican Party gradually regain its political influence, and eventually became evenly matched with the Democratic Party. Neoconservatism, especially the “neoconservatives” who have a greater influence on U.S. domestic and foreign policies, was largely born out of the liberal camp. They switched to the conservative camp because they were dissatisfied with the liberals’ too laissez-faire and pluralistic moral values. It continues the local priority thinking of the old conservatism, is highly sensitive to external threats, and absorbs the foreign intervention and globalist styles of liberals. It advocates that the foundation of American prosperity and security lies in eliminating dissidents and promoting American systems to the world with its superior strength.
Since the Reagan era, by vigorously responding to the two “global existential threats” of the Soviet Union and terrorism, American neoconservatives have accumulated a lot of experience in political mobilization, strategic planning and policy practice in the field of foreign affairs and security, and have cooperated with the military-industrial complex. , traditional energy giants and conservative media and think tanks are tied to each other and become an important component of the national security power group. In terms of China policy, neoconservatives have always had doubts about the “engagement” mentality and have long revealed their intention to contain China’s development.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush publicly called China a “strategic competitor”; as a policy witness and a core think tank of the neo-conservatives, Fan Yalun believed that the United States had been responding to China’s rise in the early stages, but was only affected by the “9·11” incident and the financial crisis. The crisis dragged on. After Obama came to power, American liberals gained the political upper hand, while the neo-conservatives fell silent for the time being, but are still gathering strength. Since the midterm elections in Congress in 2010, conservatives have gradually counterattacked against liberals. A group of young Republican politicians with neoconservative hard-line thinking, such as Marco Rubio and Ben Sasse, have taken advantage of the momentum to emerge. Most of them have become firm supporters of today’s “super tough” approach to China. During the Trump era, the neoconservatives regained their influence in the field of diplomacy and security as the Republican Party came to power again. At this time, they have shifted their strategic attention to China and influenced the formulation of China policy with the strong diplomatic thinking unique to neoconservatism. After the reshaping of China policy during the Trump era, the neo-conservatives began to solidify “strong response to China” as another core political proposition after “strong counter-terrorism”. In February 2021, the U.S. Conservative Political Action Conference unprecedentedly set up six panel discussions on China issues. Jim Banks, chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, made it clear that “China issues are the key to the development of the neoconservative movement. If “For Republicans to win the White House in 2024 and regain the majority in 2022, we need to continue to be tough on China as a key part of our platform.”
Some scholars further pointed out, “Many neoconservatives welcome the U.S.’s comprehensive shift toward toughness toward China and believe that it comes too late; they think so because a comprehensive shift toward toughness toward China will eventually lead U.S. foreign and security policies toward the direction they are familiar with. move forward to restore America’s military strength and moral clarity against a worthy great power enemy.”
Part 3
The Republican Party’s push to be “super tough” on China originally focused on domestic political needs. However, under a series of changes in the internal and external situation, being “super tough” on China not only has an impact on U.S. domestic politics, but also causes changes in U.S. policy toward China that have not happened in decades, leading to profound changes in the strategic layout of U.S. diplomacy and security.
As far as U.S. domestic politics is concerned, the Republican Party’s “super tough” strategy toward China has in fact exacerbated rather than bridged the differences between the two parties. It has also stimulated domestic anti-Asian sentiment and deepened social divisions. In recent years, the unprecedented polarization between the two parties in the United States is obvious to all. The middle ground where compromise and consensus can be reached has become extremely small, and the exhausting political battle of “one party agrees with another and I oppose it” has become increasingly fierce. As an admirer of Roosevelt and a witness to domestic social turmoil during the Vietnam War, Biden is well aware that political and social divisions are a prominent challenge to the prosperity and security of the United States. He hopes to use the domestic crisis to force the “Second New Deal” and build consensus to rebuild the United States. Therefore, whether it is to exaggerate external threats to unite the country, or to use foreign policy issues that are relatively easier to reach consensus to promote bipartisan cooperation, the Biden administration has chosen to basically maintain this round of tough stance against China initiated by the Republican Party. However, what the Republican Party currently advocates is “divisive politics” rather than “consensus politics.” Its political purpose of initiating a tough stance on China is to make dealing with China “something that only Republicans can do” in order to gain a greater advantage over the Democratic Party. political advantage. This fundamental logical difference determines that even though both parties now generally agree on the “China threat,” Republicans still have to adopt a “super tough” posture that is better than that of Democrats in order to check and balance the Biden administration.
Against this background, China policy has not become the growth point for bipartisan cooperation that Democrats expected, but has instead become a flashpoint for partisan disputes. Republicans accuse the Biden administration of being weak in dialogue and engagement with China. China-related legislation led by the Democratic Party in both houses of Congress has been repeatedly questioned by Republicans as lacking substantive significance and action, and has not been advanced smoothly. The influence of the Republican Party’s “super tough” stance on China is not limited to the foreign policy level, but has also stimulated anti-Chinese and anti-Asian sentiments in American society. Since the COVID-19 epidemic spread in the United States in 2020, right-wing populist forces in the United States have concocted and promoted conspiracy theory narratives about the “relationship” between the COVID-19 virus and the Asian community, resulting in a surge in anti-Asian hate violence in the United States, with the Chinese-American community being particularly hurt. In this regard, the Republican Party’s promotion of a hard-line anti-China agenda has contributed to the escalation of anti-Asian social sentiment. Zhang Huayao, a professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University, pointed out: “In particular, the Republican Party’s strategy of ‘blaming’ the new coronavirus and bashing China has incited anti-Asian sentiment.” racial hatred of Americans.”
As far as Sino-U.S. relations are concerned, the Republican Party’s insistence on being “super tough” on China has significantly shifted the U.S.’s strategic understanding and policy toward China to a negative position, restricting the healthy development of Sino-U.S. relations.
In the middle and late stages of Obama’s administration, the United States had already launched a round of major debates on China policy. Views such as “China-US relations have reached a ‘critical point'” and “‘engagement’ with China has limited effectiveness and needs to be changed” began to gain traction in the U.S. strategic circles. catch on. Since then, the China policy that focuses on “engagement” has actually been loosened at the ideological level. However, most of the US strategic circles’ strategic doubts about China in this round of debate are still “China is trying to gain dominance in the Asia-Pacific region and exclude the United States from Asia.” The response focuses on “restraining China’s behavior” and has not yet transformed strategic competition or even comprehensive confrontation. as a future policy option. However, since Trump came to power, conservative forces in the Republican Party have continued to push for “super toughness” on China, gradually disintegrating some of the basic understandings of China that maintain the stability of Sino-US relations.
First of all, the United States’ past tradition of relatively respecting China’s domestic political system and governance has significantly regressed. Negative assessments and even malicious attacks on the nature of the Chinese regime and the Chinese Communist Party have risen sharply. Dealing with China is increasingly being described as a continuation of its confrontation with China. Another “show between good and evil” after the Cold War between the Soviet Union and global counter-terrorism. Secondly, the existing understanding that contact and cooperation with China can bring about mutual benefit and win-win results has been seriously questioned. The view that China has “unjustly benefited” from its interactions with the United States and has “seriously penetrated” the domestic political economy of the United States is rampant.
Third, strategic doubts about China have significantly escalated. It is believed that China now not only wants to achieve regional dominance in Asia, but also competes with the United States for “global hegemony.” The above-mentioned cognitive shift has profound and cross-partisan changes in U.S. policy toward China. In 2016, Kurt Campbell, who served as the State Department’s Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs during the Obama era, also regarded Sino-US strategic competition as an “unsuccessful Asia-Pacific policy prospect”; now, he serves as the National Security Council Secretary of the Biden administration. Campbell, the Pacific Affairs Coordinator, personally announced the end of the era of “contact” between the United States and China and the beginning of the era of “competition.” Under the tone of “strategic competition,” the Biden administration is portraying relations with China as a “showdown between democracy and autocracy.” The so-called principle of “compete when it’s time to compete, cooperate when we can, and confront when necessary” are actually principles for dealing with China. It is still dominated by competition and confrontation, and it is difficult to achieve substantial breakthroughs in cooperation.
At the same time, the United States’ positioning of relations with China that blindly highlights opposition has also seriously affected China’s policy toward the United States. In April 2021, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi put forward “five points of hope” for the development of Sino-US relations, emphasizing that the United States should “objectively understand and treat China’s development rationally”, “respect and tolerate the path and system independently chosen by China” and “not Interfering in China’s internal affairs at every turn” and so on. At present, it seems that the Biden administration’s China policy is far from China’s vision, and the “super tough” approach of the Republican conservative forces towards China is even more contrary to it. Under such conditions, China cannot feel the sincerity of the United States in promoting the healthy development of relations with China, let alone truly reach a new strategic consensus that can lead Sino-US relations out of the predicament and into the future. Bilateral interactions will inevitably encounter more collisions.
As far as U.S. foreign and security policy is concerned, driven by the Republican Party’s “super tough” stance toward China, responding to the “China threat” has led to a new round of U.S. national security strategic transformation. The construction of the post-war US national security strategic system is inseparable from the construction and response to external threats; the perception of the severity of external threats directly determines the form layout and operational efficiency of the US national security strategy. During the Cold War, in the name of curbing the “global expansion of communism,” the United States promulgated the National Security Act, established the National Security Council, and built a global alliance system, thereby establishing a national security strategic system in the modern sense. After the end of the Cold War, the United States ushered in “one superpower”, and the national security strategy entered a “drifting period” due to the lack of outstanding threats; until the “9·11” incident highlighted the threat of terrorism, the “Patriot Act” was enacted, and the Homeland Security With the establishment of the Ministry of National Defense, the U.S. national security strategic system has undergone another change and adjustment.
There are two points worth noting in the above history. First, the conservative forces of the Republican Party have always played a pioneering role in promoting and responding to security threats. They tend to portray the United States’ struggle against external threats as a “show between good and evil” and have a very tough stance. Second, China has a special status in the post-war national security perspective of the United States. The United States has long not regarded China as a core external threat and the main basis for determining its national security strategic layout. In the process of anti-Soviet and anti-terrorism, the United States also regarded China as a security threat. Partner.
During the Obama era, the United States began to realize that its national security strategic layout, which had mainly focused on terrorist threats in the past, was increasingly unable to cope with rising global threats and the increasing strength of regional powers, and it was helpless and difficult to make fundamental changes. During the Trump era, the conservative forces of the Republican Party came to power, highly exaggerated the “great power competition”, and regarded China as the “highest threat” to U.S. national security. The U.S. national security strategy, which was mired in anti-terrorism, began to transform based on the “China threat” like never before: Conservative “China-savvy” strategists who were not in the mainstream in the past, such as Boming and Navarro, once intensively occupied high-level decision-making positions, shaping and integrating the “whole-of-government” perception and response to China’s threats; the global alliance system and force deployment began to undergo profound adjustments, and “India The “Pacific” region has become the primary geopolitical concern, NATO is paying more and more attention to the “China threat”, and the “Quadrilateral Security Dialogue Mechanism” of the United States, Japan, Australia and India has become increasingly important to China; the “counter-insurgency” national security thinking under the anti-terrorism system emphasizes tactical operations and regional strikes. Systematic adjustments have begun, shifting to a more emphasis on global, long-term, and multi-field “strategic competition” and a greater emphasis on the role of economic and technological security in the national security layout.
Since the Trump era, the “super tough” approach to China promoted by the conservative forces of the Republican Party has had a great impact on U.S. domestic politics and Sino-US relations. After this promotion, being tough on China has basically become the strategic consensus and strategic consensus of the two parties, the government and the opposition, and the U.S. government. A new “political correctness” in U.S. foreign policy. Although the Republican Party lost the 2020 presidential election, given that the two parties have about the same number of seats in the two houses of Congress and that American society continues to show a trend of conservatism, the conservative forces of the Republican Party still have considerable political energy and are “super tough” on China. The potential policy impact cannot be underestimated. In order to strengthen the legislative obstruction of Democrats and win back the majority in Congress, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy announced at the end of June 2021 that more than 100 House Republicans would form seven working groups to “account for China.” The working group is the only country-specific working group. Mike Pence, who once served as Vice President of the Trump administration, intends to return to politics and has recently formed a conservative political organization, Advancing American Freedom, which specifically mentioned China as an “adversary” that the United States needs to “firmly deal with.”
It can be seen that the Republican Party is currently stepping up political planning with an eye on the 2022 congressional midterm elections and the 2024 presidential election, and the importance of being “super tough” on China has become increasingly prominent in its strategic layout. However, the push by the conservative forces of the Republican Party to be “super tough” on China is not without resistance. For example, the left-wing progressive forces in the United States do not agree with blindly promoting competition with China. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a core left-wing politician, clearly opposes the “new cold war” with China. Many American progressive organizations have repeatedly called for more consideration of cooperation and avoid excessive hostility when dealing with relations with China. In the context of China issues being deeply involved in U.S. domestic politics, the “super tough” approach to China promoted by the conservative forces of the Republican Party has become a political strategy with strategic influence. Whether the U.S. policy towards China will further slide into passive confrontation in the future will largely depend on the status of the Republican Party in the political arena, and the extent to which U.S. leaders can avoid “anti-China politics” from coercing the formulation of China policy, think rationally, and Grasp the future direction of Sino-US relations and achieve the “depoliticization” of China policy and even overall foreign and security policy.