Feng Leng
BANNED
- Aug 3, 2017
- 4,350
- -21
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Biden just weakened his China policy and did Xi Jinping a big favor
The administration failed to bolster the U.S. cases to keep Chinese firms Xiaomi and Luokung Technonlogy on a blacklist.
thehill.com
Until now, the Biden administration’s China policy has been characterized by relatively seamless continuity with the transformational approach of the Trump national security team on Taiwan, the South China Sea, Hong Kong, trade and human rights.
Last week, it expanded its human rights enforcement beyond endorsing former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s declaration of Communist China’s genocide in Xinjiang Province (the independent state of East Turkestan until China’s invasion in 1950). His successor, Antony Blinken, announced the unprecedented sanctioning of a Chinese official for persecuting Falun Gong practitioners, noting that China “broadly criminalizes religious expression, and continues to commit crimes against humanity and genocide against Muslim Uyghurs and members of other religious and ethnic minority groups.”
Similarly, on the fraught issue of Taiwan, President Biden’s national security team has moved incrementally to broaden and deepen bilateral relations by increasing high-level interaction between U.S. and Taiwan officials. Further, the United States recently joined with Taiwan to establish a Coast Guard Working Group to coordinate maritime security policy, after Beijing officially declared that its coast guard could fire on foreign vessels.
The administration tried unsuccessfully to persuade visiting Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to state publicly that, if necessary, Japan will stand by its American ally and help defend the 24 million people of Taiwan. That would be the reciprocal commitment for the U.S. pledge to support Japan’s defense of the uninhabited Senkaku Islands against a Chinese attack. But Suga would agree only to an anodyne joint statement to “underscore the importance of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and encourage the peaceful resolution of cross-Strait issues.”
However, even that one step forward was soon followed by two steps backward, as Suga twice said publicly that Japan’s military will not get involved in a conflict over Taiwan — despite its critical location for Japan’s own security.
Tokyo’s hesitancy reflects the Biden administration’s unwillingness to declare its intention to defend Taiwan and move beyond the outdated policy of strategic ambiguity. Instead, Kurt Campbell, China policy coordinator at the National Security Council, diluted Blinken’s frequent statements that U.S. support for Taiwan is “rock-solid.” He told a security conference recently, “I believe that there are some significant downsides to the kind of what is called strategic clarity.” But history teaches painful lessons on the dangers of strategic vagueness in the face of aggression.
Conceivably, President Biden has privately conveyed a clear deterrent message on Taiwan to Beijing, as former President Trump said he had done. But “red lines” secretly made are easily denied and of limited value in avoiding strategic miscalculation by an adversary bent on aggression, as China openly declares it is regarding Taiwan.
Meanwhile, U.S. Navy ships have made Taiwan Strait transits on the average of one a month, though no U.S. aircraft carrier has done so since 2007 — even as China’s fledgeling carrier force routinely makes the passage through what Beijing calls “Chinese waters.”
But there is one important area where Biden administration backsliding has undeniably occurred: enforcement of Trump’s crackdown on U.S. investment in Chinese technology companies that support the People’s Liberation Army. Last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin removed Chinese technology giant Xiaomi from a blacklist of such companies considered security risks pursuant to an executive order Trump signed last November.
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They are weakening very quickly. The trend will only accelerate as their share of global foreign currency reserves shrink and China's digital currency supplants SWIFT.
