EXPERT INTERVIEW — As the U.S. prepares for its transfer of power, there is one global security issue on which the Biden and Trump Administrations would agree: China represents the most profound long-term threat to U.S. national security. That’s an opinion shared by officials in the intelligence community, the diplomatic corps, and the national security teams for both leaders — though they may differ markedly when it comes to what to do about the threat.
The issue is complicated by the range of threats: from the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, to China-linked cyberattacks, to China’s support for Russia, Iran and North Korea in the so-called “Axis of Authoritarians.” Meanwhile, scholars of the U.S.-China relationship say it has reached a historical low point, more than four decades after Washington established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Few American scholars know that relationship better than Orville Schell, the Director of the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, who has studied and visited China regularly since the 1970s. He spoke Thursday with Cipher Brief Managing Editor Tom Nagorski, about the various issues that he believes have brought the US-China relationship to a “particularly dangerous inflection point."
Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Cipher Brief: We're at one of the lowest points, if not the low point, in the nearly five decades of Washington's relationship with the PRC, and we may also be on the verge of a new collision course between Beijing and the Trump administration taking office. How dangerous a moment is this?
Schell: We are really at a particularly dangerous inflection point, because after nine [U.S.] presidential administrations all supporting engagement, I think the president and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, has essentially put a stake through the heart of that whole policy structure. So we're drifting off into an increasingly fraught, competitive, even hostile relationship. And we've seen one shoe drop in the Ukraine, a second in the Middle East, and should a third shoe drop into conflict in Asia, I think in effect, we would be off into World War III.
The Cipher Brief: I assume Taiwan is the leading edge of what you're talking about. But while Taiwan is necessarily and frequently in the conversation, there are those who think that the South China Sea may be a more likely flashpoint in 2025. What's your view on either of those rearing its head in the year ahead?
Schell: There are two imminent threats. China's intentions to reincorporate Taiwan into the “motherland” of China, and the South China Sea, where we see tremendously fraught relationships with countries including the Philippines, Vietnam and elsewhere. And Japan and China have contested the Senkaku Islands as well, so that's a third point of potential conflict. Any of those could erupt. I don't think we're going to see an amphibious assault of Taiwan, but we do see an increasing encroachment across what have been red lines up until now. And what China does – I think the best example is what they did in the South China Sea, where they said, we're not going to militarize islands, but they built islands, and then they did militarize them bit by bit, denying the United States that moment when we could say, OK, that's it. That's enough.
I think we'll see the same thing happen in these other areas of conflict.
The Cipher Brief: On the South China Sea, you mentioned the Philippines. It seems hard to imagine there won't be a maritime incursion or clash between China and the Philippines in the coming year, and the United States is treaty-bound to help the Philippines. Help us to understand how that might unfold.
Schell: The U.S. has three treaty allies in Asia: the Philippines, Japan, and Korea. And we are bound if there is aggression against the Philippines to respond. So the question then is, what constitutes aggression? At what moment does the United States say, OK, we're not going to allow this to go any further?
Under [Philippine ex-President Rodrigo] Duterte, he tried to sort of hug it out with Xi Jinping and work it out. It didn't work. So [Philippine President Ferdinand] Marcos [Jr.] has come in and he's adopted a very different perspective, which is that China does not have a legitimate claim to any of the islands in its EEZ [Exclusive Economic Zone]. And yet China keeps very aggressively and belligerently pressing those claims with ships, with planes and all sorts of water cannons, trying to drive the Philippines out of the islands, which are very close to the Philippines.
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The Cipher Brief: Let's come to a domestic issue for the United States. Trade is not really on its face a national security issue, but it could well become a big source of increased tension between the U.S and China. Donald Trump has said repeatedly, 60 % tariffs are coming on Chinese imports. Putting aside how realistic that is, what do you see in terms of how the Chinese may respond?
Schell: I think the Chinese are very uncertain and very confused by Trump, because he is a contradiction. On the one hand, it's very high tariffs, sanctions, punitive responses, economic policies that restrict China's ability to act in the global market system. On the other side is Trump's conceit that he can work it out with anybody. And so I think it's very likely that in the early weeks or months of his administration, you will see him interacting with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Now, what he'll get out of it is another question. But he has that idea that his strength is that he knows how to deal with autocrats. So I think this could really sort of roil the waters early on, if he does make a trip to Beijing. What's he going to give away? What's he going to get?
The Cipher Brief: Let’s turn to China's malign influence campaigns, which now cover so many different areas, along with recent cyber attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure that have been traced back to Beijing. Should we just assume those are going to continue? And what can the United States do to deter those?
Schell: One of the things that is a hallmark of Xi Jinping's reign is that it's not sufficient for him to control the story within China itself. He wants to control the story outside of China. As he says, we have to learn how to tell the China story better. So this means that all of the old sort of atrophied aspects of the Chinese Communist Party, like the United Front Department, whose job it is to deal with diaspora Chinese and foreign affairs in terms of propaganda, have been ramped up, better funded, and better organized. And so we see these myriad efforts around the world, whether it's in the media, in elections, to have influence and to do that largely sub rosa. Australia has experienced it, we've experienced it.
We do need to be aware that this is really important to China. How people in the outside world see China deeply matters to Xi Jinping, and he wants to control it. And so we see, whether it's efforts to influence elections, whether it's buying up media – for instance, in America today, there is not a single Chinese-language media outlet of consequence that's not managed and owned by the Chinese mainland. There used to be several. So this is a kind of malign influence that has not diminished in the last few years. It's only grown.
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The Cipher Brief: Last August, [U.S. National Security Advisor] Jake Sullivan and [China’s Foreign Minister] Wang Yi met and talked about ways to get at least the communications between their two countries back on track. There was also talk about understanding the value of “win-win competition.” The point was, as I understood it, to have some guardrails in terms of the way the two countries would talk to each other. What happens with those going forward?
Schell: These guardrails were very important to the Biden administration, particularly the military-to-military dialogue. It's really important to keep those doors open and people talking. However, it's very uncertain what Trump's response is going to be to that. And Xi Jinping's fundamental conception of the relation of China to the United States and the West is what he calls a hostile foreign relationship. So this is a point of departure for Wang Yi and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Xi Jinping – that fundamentally there is a deep and abiding distrust about the intentions of America. And of course, the feeling in China amongst the Communist Party is that America, if it had its druthers, would go for a regime change, even though we say that's not what we want. So that creates an environment where it's very difficult to imagine jumping over anything more than very basic forms of communications channels into something that's more friendly, more open, and really changes the terms of the game. I think Xi Jinping is not fundamentally comfortable with the idea that the terms of the game can be changed as they now stand.
The Cipher Brief: People have talked for a long time about the possibility for some common ground between the U.S. and China. Climate change comes up a lot. Or perhaps global health, public health. Is there hope on those fronts, or other areas, for a better relationship?
Schell: Well, we keep trying on climate change. But if you can't get together on a pandemic, what can you get together on? None of this has been tremendously successful because as I said, I think Xi is not open to a fundamental realignment of the relationship.
But on a hopeful note, history has a curious way of changing and moving on. And I've seen China now for many, many decades. When I first went there in the 1970s and Mao Zedong was still alive and the Cultural Revolution was going on, there was no sense that China would change, not a whiff of it. And yet in 1976, Mao died and things did change. And they will change again. And this is why it's important to keep diplomatic channels open, to keep as many channels open as we can, even though it's frustrating and it seems to go nowhere, because in due course, there is a deep reservoir of other kinds of influences underground in China, and they will express themselves again sometime. Right now, Xi Jinping has really got a new kind of techno-autocracy, which makes those voices mute, but they're there. They will come back. And that's somewhat hopeful.
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