US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken should arrive in China next week to establish guardrails to bilateral relations, prevent incidents, and avoid escalations that can get out of control.
The bilateral situation is very uneven. America has developed a whole strategy for China. It set up “de-risking,” securing technology and crucial supply lines out of Beijing’s reach. It is more viable than de-coupling (the idea of separating China’s economy from the rest of the world) and has the EU and G7 support.
At the May 19th Hiroshima meeting, America expanded the G7, also inviting India, Indonesia, South Korea, Brazil, et cetera. It almost transformed the forum into a network for an anti-China coalition. It had India join a quasi-military alliance with a significant agreement on a bilateral defense industry ostensibly aimed at Beijing. It supports the ongoing Ukrainian offensive against Russia, which China supported 16 months ago in its ill-conceived invasion.
The US has established a complex set of political instruments that move military, economic, and technology against China.
On the other side, what does China do? China protests air force or navy incursions in its self-proclaimed air or waters. It protests technological exclusion. It opposes an expanded G7, et cetera. It says “no” to US initiatives but apparently has little initiative of its own.
It comes from cultural tradition also. For centuries, the unspoken presupposition was that the foreign world wouldn’t matter if you secured domestic stability. The US is just the opposite. With its written and unspoken rules, the domestic balance is in constant motion and hard to tweak. But foreign policy is the element that projects internal stability. It has been so since America’s forefathers, the ancient Greek city-states, the Roman Empire.
The US can move quickly and efficiently on foreign policies, but China has trouble there. Yet now more than ever, every country in the world is dominated by foreign politics. It fits America’s tradition and not China’s.
It thus imposes a colossal sacrifice on China.
Bibles
The Old Testament starts with a massacre of babies; all firstborns had to be killed to eliminate Moses, the man the soothsayer said would liberate the Jews, serfs essential to the Egyptian state. Moses, anyway, evaded that fate.
The Gospel starts with a similar bloodbath. King Herod orders the killing of all firstborns to prevent the birth of the new king of the Jews, Jesus. He, like Moses, escapes his doom.
The stories are at the heart of the Christian and Muslim faiths, believed true by over half of the global population.
Modernizing China also started with a massacre, not of the first but the second born. Since 1980, right after the launch of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening up, millions of children were aborted, killed just out of the womb, or drowned in cold water in an unprecedented family planning campaign that strictly imposed only one child per couple.
Over 40 years, about 400–500 million babies failed to be born. They were sacrificed on the altar of national economic progress at the behest of Beijing, with the blessing of the Western powers in awe and worried about the Chinese population explosion.
Since Mao and his Communist party took control in 1949, the population grew unfettered, believing in a naïve economics that more people meant more power in the international political game.
In fact, doubling the population in three short decades drained national resources. If it continued in 1980, it would have drowned the Chinese economy and sandbagged the world. It would have made China a behemoth of about 1.8 billion people, the current size of the Indian subcontinent.
As punishment for their massacre, the Egyptians lost their pharaoh, his army swamped by the waves of the Red Sea, says the Old Testament. As punishment, King Herod’s Jews lost their land and were scattered around the world, said the Jews following Jesus after the Romans destroyed the temple in a vain uprising.
Is there a price China is going to pay for its slaughter of innocents?
“I killed babies in the day, and delivered, saved them at night,” says a gynecologist who, in the 1980s, was part of the family planning campaign.
“We would give them injections, and they would get a miscarriage. But once, in what was to be a miscarriage, a mother delivered a baby who was alive. Possibly I messed up the dose of the miscarriage medicine. The mother called me at night and showed me the baby was alive despite suffering. I helped him, stabilized him, and saved him. The mother ran away with the baby in the morning, fearing it would be taken away.”
Forty years later, the doctor laughs at himself, the situation, and the horror he witnessed and procured.
In his interview with the Chinese in 2016, the Pope encouraged people to forgive themselves for the monstrous wave of abortions.
Are the Chinese doing it? The collapse of the birth rate tells a different story.
Unforgiven?
Faced with a graying population before it fully developed, Beijing ended family planning and encouraged people to have at least three children. Still, the Chinese do not want children.
Other developed countries also don’t want children, and trying to redress the trend is highly costly and works poorly.
China doesn’t have the resources. Many families earmark about 40% of their savings for their only child. Then two children would bankrupt a family or dramatically drop the standard for child care—the family shoulders the cost of hospitals and education. The state can’t step in. It is burdened by a mountain of debt from local authorities; it simply can’t take on any more.
In the past Chinese quietly obeyed. They sacrificed their second born, and all did, from top to bottom, from Deng’s family onwards. Almost all but the most stubborn peasants accepted having only one child.
It was the same during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s. Almost all tacitly starved to death in a famine that took perhaps 30 million lives. They didn’t rise, rebel, take their tools, and use them as weapons against the cadres.
As recently as with Covid, confronting the immense danger of the first large pandemic of modernity, almost all accepted segregation at home until the disease prevailed over all precautions and spread everywhere.
Will the Chinese again obey, change their lifestyles, agree to a poorer lifestyle for the country’s sake, and agree to have more babies? Even if it happens, it will take more than a decade to show results, as with the 1980 family planning. Meanwhile, the situation is getting tricky.
Blinken in China
Blinken is coming to Beijing to put a floor to the sinking bilateral confrontation. China’s political space is becoming tighter by the day. Germany, one of China’s main economic partners and investors, agreed to supply $5.8 billion worth of diesel submarines to India. They are extra silent, would deny access to the growing fleet of Chinese aircraft carriers, and would push the Chinese Navy out of the Indian Ocean and the sensitive African supply routes.
In the north, Russia is faring poorly in Ukraine, and the specter of a disintegrating country is looming larger. China might soon be completely surrounded.
Is this because these fathers of single children now ruling China suffer too much?
There seems to be great difficulty in reversing even domestic decisions. China should have changed its demographic policy over a decade ago.
That should have also been the case with the real estate sector, which has now crowded the market with almost a hundred million unsold finished apartments. Some estimates say real estate debt makes up 60% of all outstanding loans.
Internal debt difficulties and full RMB convertibility are issues that should have been addressed 20 years ago. The cost of holding foreign currency to trade abroad and expand domestic M2, almost unrelated to the alien financial world, is exceptionally high, chaotic, and tricky.
China could not make decisions two decades ago, and now President Xi Jinping has to deal with it all. He also cannot blame past leaders because those were judgment calls; they were wrong or complex, but there was no corruption or ill intention. These decisions were upheld by mighty state machinery that had their self-interest in preserving the status quo and their power.
Moreover, Xi owes his present position to the achievements of past leaders; it is difficult and tricky to call out their political mistakes.
It was challenging to turn the massive machinery then; it’s difficult now because he rules through a vast bureaucracy expressing a social consensus.
Xi’s unique contribution to China’s progress was to lead massive reforms in the party and state organization. He concentrated power to an unprecedented extent. But even power concentration needs public support at home and abroad, ideally both.
Process of Power
Still, Deng took power, sending his enemies, the notorious Gang of Four, to a public and highly political trial. He reckoned with Mao’s legacy. Xi put millions under investigation and thousands on trial. But their politics was subsumed under the broad claim of corruption.
Xi’s support abroad is low and may be dwindling at home after Covid and the weak economic performance. In May, exports tumbled. They slumped 7.5% year-on-year, much larger than the forecast 0.4% fall and the biggest decline since January. Imports contracted 4.5%, slower than the expected 8.0% decline and April’s 7.9% fall. It was because of weak global demand and possibly because de-risking has started biting.
The cadres, beneficiaries of decades of reforms, feel their livelihoods threatened and are against Xi. But they have no alternative plan or organization and won’t turn on him. He can’t fire them all and hire new ones, but can hardly rule with restive officials who drag their feet every step of the way.
It is not the end of everything. China does have immense reserves of strength and resilience, and it would be very innocent to believe in a sudden collapse. But anyway, changes are long overdue.
Can the party decide to take necessary and sensitive turns?
Democracies have similar problems, but the debate is public, and one can see the movement and the hope spicing up the air. In China, everything is underwater, and only occasional bubbles tell the people on the surface what is going on 20 feet below.
The Jews regained their land after the most appalling and monstrous extermination in history. People were wiped out before, but never with such systematic, methodical precision and cruelty.
The Nazis killed Jews with the pseudoscientific, modern idea that it was not their culture but their blood and genes that were poisonous. The notion treated Jews like an extra-species pest, using pseudo-biology to negate the biological fact that Jews bleed and cry like anybody else.
So, what will the Chinese do? They hardly over the massacre of their second born and apparently have left Xi with the impossible task of reviving the child who survived the miscarriage, who is not dead, and still not quite alive.
For Christians, in this situation, as the Pope has repeated time and again, there is only one way out: Let God forgive you. It is not a very communist formula, and it is undoubtedly not political. But perhaps there might be a source of inspiration here. The party should maybe look off the beaten track and think of different ways to escape the situation.
