China, explained.
China's President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump during a military review in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, on 24 September. (Brendan Smialowski/Getty)
The pageantry of the Washington summit belies talk of US-China competition.
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Trump-Xi summit: Who is competing? Trump-Xi summit: Who is competing?
So elaborate has been the pageantry and ceremony of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington, DC that one is apt to forget the two superpowers are supposed to be in competition. In President Trump’s eagerness to impress his guest - which included a tour of the new presidential helipad - he has appeared deferential to the point of obsequiousness.
Just how important is it for America to win the strategic competition with China?
We have been told for years now that in a deeply divided Washington, the only issue that unites Republicans and Democrats is their shared fear of China’s rise and the urgent necessity to compete with it. Indeed, the first Trump administration officially designated China as a “strategic competitor”, although it was never clear that the President himself bought into this framing. Given his readiness to refer to the US-China relationship as a “G2” and the stagecraft of this visit, it is even less clear today that Trump sees China as a strategic competitor.
It was left to President Xi himself to issue a reminder about competition, in his remarks (Opens in new window) at the welcoming ceremony:
We do not need to avoid mentioning competition, but our competition should be a healthy one and should be kept within bounds. It should be a race of catching up with one another, not a wrestle in which one either wins or loses.
In other words, Xi wants competition to be confined to areas where both sides will ultimately benefit (technology and economics, presumably). He’s thereby excluding “strategic” competition, which unavoidably has winners and losers. On an issue like Taiwan, for instance, it’s impossible for the US and China to compete in a way that allows one or the other to “catch up”. Competition over Taiwan is not a race, it’s a boxing match.
That’s true not just for Taiwan but for the broader Asia Pacific, where the US enjoyed undisputed strategic leadership after the Cold War ended. It should come as no surprise that a country as big as China, with an economy almost as large as that of the US, would want to dispute that arrangement and assert its own leadership. Those are the ingredients for a strategic competition.
Winners in such a competition are decided by both capability and will. Both countries have plenty of the former, and Trump has been eager to demonstrate America’s military prowess to President Xi during this visit, including with one startlingly loud (Opens in new window) warplane flyover.
The real question concerns will or resolve. Just how hard are these two nations prepared to fight, and what are they prepared to risk, to win this competition?
Xi’s remarks about refusing to “wrestle” with the United States should not be read as Chinese reluctance to compete. In fact, given that this contest is about who gets to be the leading power in Asia, where China is located and the US is not, you would expect China to be more invested. So, the more plausible reading of Xi’s remark is that he wants America to give in.
Will it?
Perhaps the lasting impression formed by the summit will be that the United States is prepared to grant China the status not of competitor, but of equal.
That question will be decided largely by the judgments its leaders make about American interests: just how important is it for America to win the strategic competition with China? But such judgments are never entirely divorced from larger questions of culture and identity, and in that regard, a short essay (Opens in new window) by the American academic Dov Levin is worth considering.
Levin draws a distinction between American cultural and family affinity with Europe, which helped generate public motivation to fight the Cold War, and US connections to Asia, which are much thinner. He also notes that Cold War Americans felt the threat of Soviet-led communist ideology very personally, whereas China is not regarded by Americans as an ideological threat.
Levin could have added that American political and cultural elites are also far differently disposed to China than they were to the Soviet Union. This is partly a function of China’s economic power – it is financially risky for Hollywood film studios to make China a villain in their summer blockbusters, and this was never a concern when Soviet Russia was the enemy.
But those commercial pressures don’t apply to America’s intellectual leaders, yet they too appear uninvested in this competition. The Cold War produced real intellectual ferment (Opens in new window) in the US. For a shorter period after the 9/11 attacks, so did the War on Terrorism. Nothing comparable has yet emerged in regard to US-China competition, even though the stakes are far higher than in the fight against terrorism.
At least part of the explanation surely lies with America’s leaders, because for all the talk of competition, no president in recent years has spoken to their own people as if China is an enemy. None have called it an “evil empire” as Reagan did of the Soviet Union and none have called for a global strategy of Chinese containment, as Truman did.
President Trump is the least likely of recent presidents to strike such a tone. His unctuousness towards Xi Jinping will no doubt be mocked by his critics. But perhaps the lasting impression formed by the summit will be that the United States is prepared to grant China the status not of competitor, but of equal.
About the author
Sam Roggeveen
Sam Roggeveen is Director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Program. He is the author of The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace (Opens in new window), and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Canberra.
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