The clear-eyed guard against misfortune,
and the wise plan for disasters the future may bring.
明者防祸于未萌，智者图患于将来
–A Three Kingdoms saying, quoted by Xi Jinping on May 19, 2015
This article analyzes trends in Chinese views of the U.S.-China interdependence from Xi Jinping’s rise to power to the COVID-19 pandemic. Xi put forward an expansive vision of national security that highlights the risks of interdependence, while also expanding China’s use of its leverage in interdependent relationships to coerce others.
These efforts have intensified significantly due to the Trump administration’s coercive actions on trade and technology. Xi’s and Trump’s shifts also accelerated a reassessment of the risks and benefits of interdependence among a broader set of Chinese elites. Most significantly, many former officials and prominent thinkers appear to be newly convinced that longstanding forms of interdependence with the United States pose intolerable risks to China. For many of the Chinese elite, COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity for China to reset its interdependence with other countries on more favourable terms for China.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has spread around the world, leaving healthcare systems in crisis and economies paralyzed, many prominent voices are reassessing the risks and benefits of globalization and interdependence. In the United States, some officials and scholars have begun to observe that the frozen state of global trade provides a unique opportunity to restructure the interdependent U.S.-China economic relationship by bringing supply chains home and reducing integration with Chinese markets. In China, where an economic recovery is already underway, elite voices are calling for the leadership to use the crisis to reset the terms of U.S.-China interdependence to the benefit of China—building on a major, years-long reassessment of interdependence.
The debate in the United States on what some call “decoupling” (脱钩) is often curiously devoid of the views of the Chinese side of the couple. Many accounts pay far too little attention to how Chinese elites understand Sino-American interdependence, often caricaturing Chinese leaders’ views. As scholars and policymakers assess the fraught future of U.S.-China relations after COVID-19 and the centrality of geo-economics to 21st-century strategy, it is essential to understand Chinese thinking on U.S.-China interdependence. Interdependent relations are maintained not only by flows of trade, investment, and technology transfer but also by people’s beliefs that such relations are benign or tolerable. Across multiple domains, Chinese officials and elites are reassessing the risks and benefits of interdependence.
U.S.-China interdependence, which generated massive economic growth, always had critics who warned against the risks of the asymmetries that had created foreign dependency. Xi Jinping changed the balance in official Chinese views of U.S.-China interdependence—primarily by putting forward an expansive vision of national security that highlights the risks of interdependence, while also expanding China’s use of its leverage in interdependent relationships to coerce others. These efforts intensified significantly after Trump’s rise to power and his administration’s coercive actions on trade and technology that began in 2018. Xi’s and Trump’s shifts also accelerated a reassessment of the risks and benefits of interdependence among a broader set of Chinese elites. Most significantly, many former officials and prominent thinkers appear to be now convinced that longstanding forms of interdependence with the United States pose intolerable risks to China.
This piece is adapted from a longer article by the author on the topic published by China Leadership Monitor on June 1, 2020.
