Big Business, No Red Phone: Why U.S. v. China Is A Different Kind Of Cold War
The first of many reasons — the most important — is civilizational. It starts from an observation: China's government knows and understands the Western world infinitely better than the other way around. The passage of many Chinese students in major American and European universities helps to partly explain this phenomenon. These students – some studied in my classes at Harvard or at King's College in London – in fact have a double culture, which is only very rarely the case on "our side."
Message to the world
We have an overall idea of what Chinese authorities want: to catch up with the West and overtake it, to erase the humiliation emanating from the long period of the nation's historical decline between 1815 and 1978. Mixed in with this undeniable desire for revenge are nationalism and ideology.
Do these analogies with the West make sense? Or is it a form of navel-gazing, if not cultural imperialism?
Xi Jinping intends both to demonstrate the superiority of the authoritarian model over the democratic model, and to affirm the return of the centrality, if not the pre-eminence of the Middle Kingdom. In 2005 at the Royal Academy in London, the centerpiece of a major exhibition of 17th and 18th century Chinese art was a large European-style painting, which showed foreign ambassadors rushing to pay homage to the Emperor of China.
China's message to the world could not have been more explicit: "You will honor us tomorrow, as you did yesterday."
We can argue that this objective has not changed since 2005, but its tempo has accelerated. It is as if China — and Germany, once its unity was achieved in 1871 — had gone from the relative caution of Bismarck and Deng Xiaoping, to the impatience of William II and Xi Jinping. But do these analogies with the Western world really make sense? Do they not reflect, on our part, a form of navel-gazing, if not cultural imperialism?
Biden and Xi Jinping shaking hands before a face-to-face bilateral meeting during the G20 Summit on November 14, 2022, in Bali, Indonesia.
Adam Schultz/The White House/ZUMA Press Wire
No "red phone" this time around
When mistrust — legitimate, given the Chinese government's current behavior — is coupled with incomprehension, anything becomes possible, including the worst. That is to say, the temptation to see every Chinese person around the world as a potential spy in the service of Beijing. In the United States in particular, the return of the "Yellow Peril," in the era of the information revolution and social networks, is a very real danger. This explains the relief felt when the perpetrator of a recent shooting targeting the Asian community was himself found to be of Chinese origin.
With each spying on the other permanently, it is difficult to be really surprised.
It is not a question here of showing sympathy towards a Chinese regime which is less and less attractive, but of curiosity and empathy towards a people, a culture and a civilization that we can only continue to ignore at our expense.
And the less understanding there is, the more essential communication becomes. But — and this is another major difference with yesterday's Cold War — there is no “red phone” between Washington and Beijing.
With each spying on the other permanently, it is difficult to be really surprised. But it is one thing to "know" — and therefore to foresee — what will happen; it is quite another to maintain a quasi-institutional, bilateral dialogue. In the “balloon affair,” for example, there is undeniably a symbolic dimension: “Even in matters of espionage, I can do more and better than you,” Chinese authorities seem to say to America.
More sophisticated than the USSR
But beyond that, with regard to the Washington-Beijing dialogue, we should be realistic, and therefore modest. It is not today a “reset” of relations between the two countries. We are very, very far from that. It's more about avoiding the worst.
In fact, China has clearly chosen Russia's side in the war in Ukraine. But that doesn't mean Beijing wants to appear to the world as an XXL version of Moscow.
The heirs of the Middle Kingdom are infinitely more sophisticated than the heirs of the Tsars. It is necessary to deal with them with realism, not naivety or weakness. Kennan's Cold War-era containment formula cannot be duplicated. The differences are too great between the real Cold War of yesterday and the strange Cold War of today.
