The fault lines in America’s China policy
The contest between America and China has a postmodern look to it. Whereas presidents tried to isolate and contain the Soviet Union, America is economically entwined with China, the current would-be hegemon. The official government posture on Taiwan is “strategic ambiguity”, a line so confusing that President Joe Biden has rewritten it several times. Perhaps that is why Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, reached for the example of the world’s most famous postmodernist architect when trying to explain the administration’s industrial and trade policies. “The way that we are going to build an international economic architecture is not going to be with Parthenon-style clear pillars as we did after the end of the second world war, but something that feels a little bit more like Frank Gehry.”
Mr Sullivan met Wang Yi, a senior Chinese foreign-policy official, for more than eight hours in Vienna last week, which suggests a mutual willingness to prevent the world’s most important bilateral relationship from getting even worse. That meeting followed speeches by Mr Sullivan and Janet Yellen, the treasury secretary, outlining the administration’s thoughts about China. Both speak for the same boss. But parse the remarks closely, and differences within the administration are clear.
Whereas Mr Sullivan is already sketching his curvilinear “new Washington consensus”, Ms Yellen says that America is simply calling for “the very same international order that helped make China’s economic transformation possible”. Mr Sullivan resoundingly criticised the trade liberalisation of the 1990s and the “China shock” to manufacturing jobs that followed. No such critiques can be found in Ms Yellen’s thinking, which aims for “healthy economic engagement that benefits both countries”.
2023-05-16 12:37:21
Link from www.economist.com
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