The US has adopted a two-pronged strategy towards China. One, is pursuing the path of dialogue, the other is confrontation. Both go hand in hand as can be seen by recent developments.
While Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State travelled to Beijing for talks, back home administration officials criticised China for its coercive behaviour worldwide. The nature of Chinese coercion is evident on all fronts and its ramifications across several fronts including economic, defence and other areas, is also a focus area for the Biden administration. Such actions are normally visible as Beijing uses tools like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Global Security Initiative to penetrate and pressurize nations. Just one recent example of the heft China carries can be cited, this time in a cultural context. In Paris at a cultural event on China, the French Museum which hosted the event was ‘forced’ to title Tibet as ‘Xizang’, the latest effort by China to show that Tibet has always been a part of China. Thus, the world should be aware of various aspects of China’s coercive tactics.
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China’s military coercion has been very visible in the South China Sea and its current actions clearly threaten the security of the Philippines. Nicholas Burns, the US Ambassador to China, recently pointed that the “very ill-advised efforts by the government of China to intimidate the Philippines at Second Thomas Shoal, at Sabina Shoal, in an incident at Scarborough Shoal, just to name three incidents over the last month or so”. Diplomatic messaging is certainly one way to signal intent and the US has been consistently doing it. Apart from the Ambassador in Beijing, Secretary Antony Blinken has conveyed US concerns to China as did US NSA Jake Sullivan, who told the Chinese leadership ‘very directly’ that Washington had an ironclad commitment to defend the Philippines!
Some officials in the US administration understand China’s strategy very well. One of them is Jose Fernandez, the State Department’s Undersecretary for economic growth, energy and the environment, who recently noted while speaking at the Asia Society that China is facing greater scrutiny and resistance globally as it is wielding its sizeable trade and geo-political leverage to coerce smaller countries economically. Fernandez said at a public event that Washington had created a playbook to help countries that came under pressure. He added that China is a “great practitioner of this economic-coercion strategy” adding that “The threat of coercion is often enough to stop countries from making sovereign decisions that may upset [China] in the first place.” This raises the question of whether China has overplayed its hand with economic coercion. The pushback that China has experienced in recent years indicates a certain disillusionment that countries have with Beijing and its policies.
With elections round the corner in the US, the future of the anti-coercion unit in the State Department is under question. However, this unit has done important and significant work. The US recognises the scale and intensity of Chinese economic coercion worldwide. It is also being done in a myriad of ways and many nations recognise that it is difficult not to land in the cross hairs of Beijing due to its enormous economic clout. Fernandez said the challenge with China lay in responding to it. While many are able to diagnose the problem, addressing it is far more difficult, Fernandez said. The difference between the US and China is that while the former engages in routine tit-for-tat trade wars, the Chinese go one step ahead and punish countries that have a history of taking positions opposed to Beijing. There are several examples of this type of behaviour.
In 2010, China imposed an unofficial export embargo of rare earth minerals to Japan following a territorial dispute over the Senkaku islands. In the same year, China also acted against Norway when the Nobel Prize was awarded to Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese human rights activist. A decade later Australia was in the cross-hairs for calling for an independent inquiry into the origins of Covid-19. In 2021, Lithuania was targeted for its allowing opening of the Taiwan representative office. Philippines is thus the latest in the series of actions that China has taken against those who speak out and oppose the Chinese line on major international issues. For the US, its network of friendly allies allows it to offer support in many ways including through supply-chain diversion strategies and looking for new markets when China targets such countries. China relies on “plausible deniability” and uses customs glitches, consumer preference and abruptly-added health and safety standards to justify punitive trade slowdowns. More importantly, Fernandez says China has made it a habit to deny any link to political issues when targeting a nation economically.
The practice of economic coercion by China is essentially weaponisation of trade networks. The intention is to compel the target state to withhold actions that are deemed contrary to Chinese interests. As seen from an overview of Chinese actions in the recent past, financial capital is used by Beijing to exercise influence through the BRI. Chinese capital is used to fund the construction of infrastructure such as seaports, railways, and other projects in developing economies. Hambantota in Sri Lanka and the railway line in Nigeria are two such examples. This way China captures the loyalty of the political elite in the host country to ensure that their interests are safe guarded. Alongside this, China engages in a propaganda drive to ensure that the narrative (be it in Africa, South Asia, South-East Asia or the Pacific islands) is built in their favour. In developed countries, China takes a different approach and weaponises trade dependence to achieve its goals. This would entail sudden stoppages of imports, reducing the flow of Chinese tourists to target states, organising consumer boycotts, and embargoes on exports.
The US-China competition is thus at its peak. The outcome of the elections in November will determine the future course of this competition. While a possible shift in US strategy could be forecast, China is likely to continue its economic coercion to ensure that its national security goals are met. The persistence of this trend will require individual nations to find ways to counter Chinese hegemony. The United States is there and will provide the support, the extent of this support will depend on the political dispensation and economic ability of Washington to assist and aid.
