Charles Parton

The US is right to rethink its relationship with China

Anyone who has worked in an office has fantasised about destroying it. As someone who has taken a sledgehammer to his office and fire to his papers – leaving the Libyan embassy in 2011 – I experienced a twinge of nostalgia on seeing Chinese diplomats burning papers after being given 72 hours to leave their consulate in Houston in July. Inevitably, the inevitable tit for diplomatic tat came, and American officials were sent packing from their consulate in Chengdu. Since then, relations between the US and China have deteriorated further, with Donald Trump pledging this week to ban the Chinese video app TikTok for national security reasons.

This breakdown in relations looks like the confluence of two currents in US politics: electoral politics combining with an ideological hostility to China within the White House, which aims to stop China’s rise. But there are many other reasons for the US to have a wider rethink about its relationship with China, of which the consulate closure in Houston and the potential TikTok ban are but the latest symptoms.

The ongoing reset of relations between the US and China will outlast the presidential election, whoever wins. Both Democrats and Republicans no longer believe that China will become ‘more like us’ as they did in the 2000s when China joined the WTO. The same realisation is happening in other liberal democracies, even if the Americans are more gung-ho than Europeans or antipodeans in severing relations with China.

Beijing’s behaviour is now seen as a threat to America’s security and values. China’s territorial expansion in the South China Sea, its intention to forcefully absorb Taiwan, and its recent skirmishes with India suggests that is becoming a military menace. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) treatment of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs, of Hong Kong, and of human rights defenders has simultaneously revealed its values, and as a result the US is intent on restricting China’s governance and surveillance systems as part of a containment strategy.

Systems, whether economic, political or values-based, are diverging more generally between the East and West – a trend accelerated by emerging technologies and by the erosion of the difference between their civil and military uses.

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Written by
Charles Parton
Charles Parton is a former UK diplomat who spent 22 years working in China. He is an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and the Council on Geostrategy.

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