America and china — it's getting dangerous | thearticle

Quick, there’s still time. If you’re one of those literary omnivores driven by another lockdown groundhog-day to seek solace in writing you would never normally dream of picking up, then the

recently published US government document “_United States Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China”_ might be for you. At only 16 pages and written in a direct, purposeful

style, it’s not your average government tract, requiring simultaneous translation from Officialese to English. And, as a direct ultimatum to China, it is a document that might

retrospectively be seen to have shaped the times in which we live. The message is not entirely new. The US National Security Strategy, published in 2017, followed by the National Defense

Strategy, released a year later, have already recorded the shift in American national strategy from a focus on terrorism to one designed for great power competition, but never previously has

declaratory US policy contained such an incendiary charge sheet against China. The core American contention is that China has been given every chance to join the community of nations in the

40 years that have followed on from the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1979, particularly with membership of the World Trade Organisation in 2001. China has not only spurned the

opportunity to become a responsible actor on the world stage, it has used every device at its disposal to gain unfair and predatory advantage over what should be its partners in a

rules-based global economic and diplomatic framework. In one of its more trenchant passages, it goes on to state: “The United States rejects Chinese Communist Party attempts at false

equivalency between rule of law and rule by law; between counterterrorism and oppression; between representative governance and autocracy; and between market-based competition and

state-directed mercantilism.” And concludes that, informed by a new approach of principled realism towards China, American policy will seek to: “…compel Beijing to cease or reduce actions

harmful to the United States’ vital national interests or those of our allies and partners.” If that’s not fighting talk, it’s difficult to know what is. Of course, it all looks so different

when seen from Beijing. In Chinese eyes the rules-based global economic and diplomatic framework enshrined in the United Nations and Bretton Woods Agreement are no more than victors’

justice, designed during and after the Second World War to confer permanent western advantage. Far from failing in its historic vocation to _converge with the citizen-centric, free and open

order as the United States has hoped, _China has chosen to reserve its national sovereignty, and, on behalf of the globally disadvantaged, to challenge arrogant and complacent western

assumptions that are not fit for the 21st Century. To Chinese ears the very tone and language of the _Strategic Approach _would capture perfectly the imperialist hauteur and condescension of

American statecraft, by which they are no longer willing to be patronised. So, plenty of room for misunderstanding and nowhere more so than in what represents conflict. No matter how

complex the arrival of cyber, space and information theatres make contemporary conflict, the American understanding still clings to the orthodoxy contained in the pages of Clausewitz’s _On

War_, where military force is the primary instrument and the culminating battle the definitive outcome. The Chinese understanding, shaped by an unforgiving history and a Confucian cultural

legacy, is more nuanced, always seeking a marginal edge in protracted engagement, which, taken over time and in aggregate, creates overwhelming advantage. The American tradition seeks an

early knock-out punch; the Chinese tradition will settle for a win on points, over 15 rounds. The Chinese view was updated in 1999 by the remarkably prescient _Unrestricted Warfare, _written

by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui — both serving officers — and which has become the _On War _for our times. Qiao and Wang saw almost every human endeavour as a means of gaining marginal

advantage in a competitive world. In what they defined as “trans-military warfare”, financial disruption, currency manipulation, exploitation of humanitarian aid, cyber warfare, information

warfare, lawfare (the manipulation of norms for factional advantage), narcotics trafficking and ecological warfare (exploitation of artificial earthquakes or tsunamis) were all fair game in

conflict which would be prosecuted relentlessly in just about every dimension of human existence, because, in their words “the battlefield is everywhere”. Seen in these terms, the Belt and

Road initiative is less an act of economic largesse than an instrument of national strategy, as are the tariffs recently slapped on Australian arable produce or the purchase of port

facilities from Kauntan in Malaysia to Zeebrugge, via Djibouti and Piraeus. Offering more direct strategic leverage over America is China’s holding of around 30 per cent of US national debt,

and with it the ability to hold the dollar hostage. More contentious still is the mass production and export of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, either direct to the US or to Canada and

Mexico for trafficking into the continental US. Opioid abuse caused 46,000 deaths in America in 2018 and Chinese involvement has been characterised as a “reverse Opium War”; it may be no

coincidence that Qiao and Wang specifically advocated drug warfare as a form of non-military engagement. The danger in all this is that America and China have developed fundamentally

different concepts of conflict, a condition the Australian commentator David Kilcullen has described in his recent book _The Dragons & the Snakes — How the Rest Learned to Fight the

West_ as conceptual envelopment. By this he means a situation where China’s conception of conflict is so much broader than America’s that the danger arises that America could take actions

that it regards as part of legitimate peacetime competition but that China, with its broader concept of conflict, sees as acts of war and responds accordingly. Indeed, it may be that this

process is already underway. Chinese premier Xi Jinping first warned of a coming conflict with America as long ago as 2013, a cry taken up more recently by the bellicose wolf warrior

posturing of Chinese diplomats. With America’s imperial power spent in Afghanistan and Iraq, its post financial crisis capitalist system showing structural flaws and its cities in flames, it

may also be that the Chinese see America in terminal decline and become tempted to abandon the strategic caution of the long game. They may also sense time is no longer on their side.

China’s economic growth is now down to 4 per cent, trending to 2 per cent by the middle of the decade, debt stands at 330 per cent of GDP and the demographic atrophy inherent in the one

child policy is coming home to roost. It’s getting complicated, and dangerous.