Commentary: Dispelling US-China myths before they become self-fulfilling prophecies

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SPACE FOR Assistance AND Movements

Despite such nuances about securitisation, the US and China still have many disagreements, such as over how peace, stability and ( which ) rules, are maintained. Obviously, this has led to growing suspicion.

We typically think of trust as being able to demonstrate that it is true, or that it is true that others share our essential spiritual principles and should be treated the same way as we would like to be treated by them, which has both social and psychological dimensions.

There can be a more analytical confidence, however, based upon anticipations about attitudes which may be created through protection, care or other mechanisms. Therefore, cooperation may occur even between untrustworthy parties as long as there are incentives and rules for the parties ‘ behavior.

During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union could reach a nuclear non-proliferation agreement. And in fact, after a meeting in November 2023 in a rumored work to lower hostilities, Mr. Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to handle fentanyl prostitution and climate shift.

What about the adage that as US-China tensions rise, there will be less space for additional nations to maneuver? As many of the nations in the non-aligned action did, greater differences may have opened up more room for other countries to compete against one another in a similar way to the one achieved by the non-aligned movement.

Different nations have their own independence, with the primary goal of protecting and advancing their own interests. Indonesia, for instance, has practised a “free and active ” foreign policy since it became independent, “rowing between two reefs ” during the Cold War.

It is important to remove some of the myths so that the world can continue to navigate the delicate and complex US-China marriage despite all of its ups and downs, lest they turn into self-fulfilling prophecies.

At Nanyang Technological University’s S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Chang Jun Yan is an associate professor for the US and military studies programs.  

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Commentary: Once enemies, Japan and US strengthen their alliance

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Does AUKUS ALLIANCE BECOME JAUKUS?

Thursday’s first intergovernmental conference between the US, Japan and the Philippines adds to the pattern of overlapping minilateralism. Following Kishida’s visit last month, a conference between the US, Japan, and South Korea was held at Camp David.

A joint naval exercise involving US, Japanese, Australian, and Philippine warships was conducted in the South China Sea also before his recent US visit.

An agreement to keep security and freedom of navigation in the South China Sea is expected to be reached at the multilateral conference with Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. China’s territorial statements to the sea area will also be challenged as a result of these international maritime maneuvers.

The Philippines and Japan will even begin political negotiations for a mutual access deal. This will allow Chinese forces to be stationed at Spanish military installations.

American Prime Minister Anthony Albanese played down the aspirations of “JAUKUS” as Kishida began his journey. He claimed that merely on a “project by job” basis is it probable that Japan would participate in Pillar II. Japan’s formal accession to the AUKUS defense empire was not envisaged.

Kishida added at Wednesday’s press event that “nothing has been decided” regarding Japan’s strong co- activity with AUKUS. Nevertheless, he reiterated that the US foreign policy creation has encouraged Japan to contribute to Pillar Two, especially in underwater war, hypersonic missile growth, and classical and computer systems.

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Commentary: Return of China's panda diplomacy with US signals warming of ties after years of tension

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WHAT IS THE Story OF?

Giant pandas have been kept at The Smithsonian’s park since 1972, making it undoubtedly the origin of panda diplomacy in the West. The aquarium lost its giant panda on November 8, 2023, when Mei Xiang, Tian Tian, and their child, Xiao Qi Ji, were flown up to China.

There were indications that tiger politics had ended as a result of the significant rise in tensions between the US and China. Additionally, it appeared that the connections between US and Taiwanese companies were getting worse. According to a survey of the US-China Business Council’s people in 2023, 34 % of planned investment in China had stopped or decreased over the past year.

However, President Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden met for a four-hour summit at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation ( APEC ) conference in San Francisco later that month and gave the impression that there was a possibility for reconciliation. The US and China “must control our relations well,” according to Xi, in a world of difficulties. Xi made an allusion to the penguins ‘ reputation among Americans.

He added that China and the United States are “ready to maintain our cooperation with the United States on dragon conservation” and that China may “do our best to meet the Californians ‘ wishes so as to enhance the friendly relations between our two individuals.”

On the outside of the APEC meeting, Xi organized a meal with hundreds of software executives, including Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, and other business leaders. Thus, Beijing’s decision to send its state treasures to California may seem natural in light of its significance to the Eastern superpower.

Beijing appears to be willing to return its bears to the US as part of a plan to improve not only its social relationship with Biden, but also, perhaps more important, to encourage US expense and reframe Beijing as a nicer trading partner.

Chee Meng Tan is University of Nottingham’s Assistant Professor of Business Economics. This commentary second appeared in The Conversation, and was published here.

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Commentary: The squawkus about AUKUS is getting louder

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On a technical level, acquiring and maintaining nuclear-powered submarines involves a big and very costly technological leap for Australia. AUKUS will be done in three complicated stages.

First, Australia will overhaul its current conventional submarines. Then, in the early 2030s, it will take delivery of some second-hand Virginia-class nuclear subs from the US. A decade later, the first AUKUS-class subs – designed in Britain, featuring US technology and built in the UK and Australia – will be deployed.

There is some quiet dismay in the Australian defence establishment at the large British role in the building of SSN-AUKUS. There is much less confidence in the UK’s military-industrial base than in US capabilities.

Those doubts will have grown following the difficulties of British aircraft carriers and the failure of a recent test of a UK Trident nuclear missile. Elizabeth Buchanan of West Point Military Academy argues bluntly that: “SSN-AUKUS probably won’t materialise.” Australian critics of AUKUS fear the country is setting off down a long and costly road to nowhere.

STRENGTHENING DETERRENCE

The strategic arguments against AUKUS are the weakest ones. The Australian government, like the Japanese and the Indians, is justifiably concerned by China’s military and territorial ambitions. It understands that if Beijing successfully invaded Taiwan – or managed to enforce its claims over the South China Sea – China would become the dominant power in the Indo-Pacific, with profound consequences for Australian security.

AUKUS is a classic effort to strengthen deterrence by increasing the risks to China of any potential aggression. As one Australian security official puts it: “The goal is to prevent a war, not to fight one.”

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Commentary: Vietnam's 'bamboo policy’ is an asset as the US, China come calling

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CAMARADERIE AND BROTHERHOOD

China is watching its Communist neighbour’s increasingly closer relations with Washington with interest. After Biden’s visit, Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong travelled to Beijing in October to meet with Xi. The Chinese leader told him that the two countries have developed a deep friendship of “camaraderie and brotherhood”, and that they should regard the bilateral relationship as a priority in their respective foreign policies – a veiled reference, or a reminder perhaps, of keeping ties strong, no matter how much the US comes knocking.  

Beijing has long-standing economic relations with Hanoi, but could do more to bring big-name Chinese companies to invest, Nguyen Quoc Cuong, a former Vietnamese ambassador to the US, told me from Hanoi.

“China is lagging behind some other countries, namely the US, in this regard. Personally, I would like to see big names like the Chinese versions of Apple or Intel in the high tech space, and the digital economy investing more here.”

But while using economic incentives to gain political leverage may be what the great powers are trying, it’s unlikely the strategy will be that straightforward. Vietnam will continue to be guided by a foreign policy that has allowed it to strike relationships with countries that are often at odds with one another. 

It’s not just about managing the US and China, Lye Liang Fook, senior fellow at the Singapore-based ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, told me.

“There is a new upgraded relationship with Japan as well. This visit by Xi is another indication of Vietnam’s delicate balancing act, but it also shows how the country has been been striking a healthy equilibrium with the major powers.”

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Commentary: How will Henry Kissinger be remembered in Southeast Asia?

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HENRY KISSINGER’S WORLDVIEW

In trying to understand the enigma of the man, we have to understand his worldview. Dr Kissinger was the ultimate practitioner of realpolitik pragmatism. For him, morality had little place in the arena of world politics where power served as its prime currency.

If anything, excessive preoccupation with moral arguments were a distraction from – if not an obstacle to – the larger objective of peace, which to him was ultimately about avoiding the kind of great power conflagration that brought about World War II. To achieve this objective, difficult decisions would have to be made which, to Dr Kissinger, left little room for sentimentality.

This leads to a second point: To Dr Kissinger, the chief actors in the script of global politics were the great powers. Throughout his time in office during the terms of US presidents Richard M Nixon and Gerald R Ford, Dr Kissinger was consumed by Cold War competition with the Soviet Union and principally, the question of how to prevent a major nuclear conflict without compromising American interests and security.

It is from this prism that some of the US’ most controversial policies during those years, many attributed to him and that have tainted his legacy, should be viewed, such as the toleration of right-wing dictatorships in Latin America, complicity in violence in Bangladesh and the bombing of Cambodia.

KISSINGER’s IMPACT ON SOUTHEAST ASIA

With these aspects of Dr Kissinger’s worldview in mind, what were his contributions and connections to Southeast Asia? After all, if indeed his preoccupation was with great power politics, how did he view a region that comprised small and medium-sized states?

As national security adviser and later also secretary of state to US presidents Nixon and Ford, Henry Kissinger served during the most turbulent years of recent Southeast Asian history, when Soviet and Chinese-supported communist movements threatened to take over many governments in the region.

While communist insurgencies raged across Southeast Asia, it was in Vietnam where the threat was most urgent. Indeed, as early on as the presidency of Dwight D Eisenhower, the US was already seized by the prospect that the fall of Indochina to communism would allow the ideology to spread across Southeast Asia. This became known as the “domino theory”.

Dr Kissinger was instrumental in crafting and executing American policy at the height of the Vietnam War. He would oversee further escalation of the war, both in terms of the number of US troops deployed and also the expansion of the war to Cambodia, which he thought necessary in order to weaken the Vietcong.

Nevertheless, the ballooning cost of the war, mounting American casualties, and President Nixon’s promise to scale down US involvement, compelled Dr Kissinger to pursue secret negotiations with North Vietnam for the US’ eventual withdrawal.

Both he and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, were awarded the 1973 Nobel peace prize for their efforts. Mr Tho declined it, and Dr Kissinger never went to Oslo to collect his for fear of widespread protests given how unpopular the war had become.

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Commentary: China seeks to lessen developing countries’ reliance on the US dollar

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CHINA LOOKS TO INCREASE THE POWER OF ITS CURRENCY

Measured against the vast tide of foreign currency transactions undertaken each day, Argentina’s yuan-for-pesos swap in August was a drop in the bucket. However, it should be seen as just the latest of numerous similar deals that Beijing is doing around the world that are designed to increase the power of its currency, known as the RMB in the markets.

The People’s Bank of China has been busily working similar swap arrangements, most notably with Russia in a deliberate strategy to help evade sanctions that have blocked it from tapping its own international reserves held in other entities.

The arrangement with Russia is almost certainly China’s biggest swap line – and it’s growing. Following the withdrawal of Visa and Mastercard, Russian banks currently issue credit and debit cards linked to China’s Union Pay system.

At last count China had signed these deals – more formally known as bilateral currency swap lines (BSLs) – with no less than 41 countries for a total notional value of US$554 billion.

There is nothing anything inherently sinister in a BSL – the Reserve Bank of Australia, for example, signed one with China years ago. The underlying principle behind a BSL is to avoid the kind of liquidity crunches that happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also to smooth out trade payments.

Until recently BSLs had no, or little, political motivation. They were purely mutually beneficial, technical arrangements. But that is changing as Beijing aims to erode the hegemony of the dollar in world markets, by default the anchor currency in a turbulent sea. As a well-researched 2022 paper by the Atlantic Council, an American think tank, points out:

“While these BSLs can be used to meet RMB (or other local currency) liquidity needs, the motivation behind these [Chinese] agreements has been to settle bilateral trade and investment transactions in RMB (or other local currencies) in order to gradually reduce the reliance on the US dollar in bilateral transactions both for political reasons and to avoid the volatility of the dollar value of local currencies due to changes in US Fed monetary policy.”

In pursuit of this long-term plan, in quick succession China has created a network of BSLs in the region it intends to dominate. Between South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, China has built up swaps to the tune of US$92 billion that will help spread the yuan throughout the fastest-developing nations in the world.

“The motivation here is to foster local currency settlement arrangements of the bilateral trade of each of these countries with China,” explains the Atlantic Council.

This can be a mutually convenient arrangement, but there is a more subtle purpose and that is to lessen reliance on the greenback by, as with Argentina, providing an alternative settlement currency. That’s why currency traders sometimes refer to the yuan as the “redback”.

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Commentary: US will only have itself to blame if China’s economic influence in Asia grows

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LIVING AND DYING BY DOMESTIC POLITICS

The IPEF was challenging to negotiate from the outset, its demands and constraints a product of US domestic politics.

The lack of access to the US market removed a key incentive from the American negotiating toolkit. It was an effort to avoid a sensitive political issue: American public opinion has become generally less supportive of free trade due to the perception that cheap foreign goods are displacing American products, especially in key swing states and unions.

Believing that “deep trade liberalisation” failed to protect American jobs and capacity, Biden’s administration bucked decades of free trade promotion to aggressively subsidise favoured industries in its competition with China. US$39 billion in manufacturing incentives was allocated under the CHIPS Act alongside US$370 billion in investments for clean energy under the Inflation Reduction Act to grow the US industrial base.

Meanwhile, labour and environmental standards were always a hard sell to partners such as Vietnam and Indonesia. These US demands tapped on these growing sentiments against free trade.

A common rallying call was that trade deals need to ensure strong labour and anti-dumping standards so American workers can compete on a “level playing field” – not just with Chinese workers, but with supply chains linked to China as well.

Yet, the IPEF was still vulnerable to the domestic forces it sought to appease. As a White House initiative, the IPEF was unlikely to garner financial support from a split Congress and could also be cancelled with a simple executive order by a future president.

Negotiators likely understood that the odds were stacked against them. The timeframe to complete IPEF negotiations was also relatively short at two years, compared to seven years for the TPP.

Ultimately, after months of disquieting rumours, the end came when the finish line was in sight. Pushback from lawmakers, such as Senator Sherrod Brown who is facing a tough re-election campaign, derailed negotiations on the trade pillar, leaving IPEF on life support.

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Snap Insight: Biden-Xi meeting - the real issues of contention in US-China ties are far from settled

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MORE CONTENTIOUS ISSUES FAR FROM SETTLED

For China, the meeting came at a time of significant economic slowdown. Progress would look like US messaging that it was not pursuing a strategy of “decoupling” or an all-out economic war. It was also looking for reassurance from the US that it does not support Taiwanese independence.

The bigger issues of contention, such as Taiwan (amid Mr Biden’s reiteration of the US’ unchanged commitment to a one-China policy), trade restrictions or China’s role in global conflicts, remain far from settled.

No amount of dialogue between the two nations’ leaders is likely to change these.

Looming in the background of the summit is the 2024 US presidential election, with Mr Biden trailing in the polls against the expected Trump candidacy. With more than 80 per cent of Americans expressing a negative view of China, any concessions around trade would be politically disastrous, even when a lifting of restrictions could achieve something the US public wants – lower inflation.

POSSIBLY THE LAST BIDEN-XI MEETING

For the Chinese, a change in the US administration offers a complicated picture. A better working relationship with Mr Biden might not count for much if this could be their last meeting.

A second Trump presidency portends a more intensified trade war and restrictions on China. At the same time, in contrast to most Republican presidential candidates, Trump has not taken a clear position of support towards Taiwan.

A decrease in US support for Ukraine, as Trump has indicated he favours, could remove one of the more uncomfortable elements in Xi’s “no-limits” partnership with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

For the rest of the world, the summit offers some hope that a return to dialogue between the superpowers may help smoothen the bumpy future of US-China relations. 

Trisha Craig is Vice President (Engagement) and Senior Lecturer of Social Sciences (Global Affairs) at Yale-NUS College. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not represent the views and opinions of Yale-NUS College or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates.

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Commentary: What mattered most to China about Australian PM Albanese’s visit

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The economic agenda was equally important to Beijing, given the difficulties China is currently facing.

Given the nature of Australia-China trade, there is a limit to the punitive measures China can impose on Australia. In fact, despite the tensions that existed with Australia under the Morrison government, overall bilateral trade has continued to grow, reaching nearly A$300 billion (US$192 billion) in 2022. This shows how complementary the two economies actually are, as well as the resilience of these economic ties.

This is what Chinese leaders and the media emphasised during Albanese’s visit and why they were highly critical of the idea of “decoupling” or “de-risking” from China’s economy.

They characterised “decoupling” as going against free trade and protectionism, but in reality, Beijing is deeply concerned over any specific measures that restrict trade in the high-tech sector, such as with semiconductors. The US and its allies have been increasingly adopting such restrictions in recent years.

THE IMPORTANCE OF WHAT WASN’T SAID

What wasn’t discussed much in the Chinese media was the gap between what Beijing presented as a successful visit and what was actually achieved.

One could argue both sides talked about the obvious – for example, that bilateral relations have more or less stabilised, compared to how they were 18 months ago. As China expert Richard McGregor astutely observed, Albanese was “pushing on an open door”.

This is not to belittle the progress made so far. The intention of both governments to resume and strengthen the many dialogues between officials from their countries is important – even critical – in “resetting” the relationship. These channels of communication are incredibly important during times of crisis as a way of managing disputes and avoiding conflicts from spiralling out of control.

Though resetting the relationship was a definite aim in the long term, there were also significant takeaways in the short term. This can be seen in how the state media coverage downplayed AUKUS and conflicts in the South Pacific, where China’s influence has raised alarm bells in Canberra and Washington.

China has signalled its displeasure over AUKUS and continues to consider it a major impediment to further improvement of bilateral relations. But Xi told Albanese they could work together on regional security challenges.

Where there are efforts to cause disturbances in the Asia-Pacific region, we must firstly stay vigilant, and secondly oppose them.

And in the Pacific, the Chinese side is seeing an opportunity for the two countries in terms of regional economic development – how Australia and China can both contribute.

Jingdong Yuan is Associate Professor of Asia-Pacific Security at the University of Sydney. This commentary first appeared on The Conversation.

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