What does the "new Cold War" with China even mean?

What does the "new Cold War" with China even mean?

Talking specifics is much better

Matthew Yglesias

Jul 22

Since the Cold War with the Soviet Union was the last major bout of geopolitical rivalry that the United States was involved with, it’s natural that people default to discussing the U.S.-China relationship in those terms.

But every time I read a take like Bernie Sanders saying “don’t start another cold war” with China, I think these analogies end up obscuring more than they reveal.

For example, a big part of the change in the D.C. consensus on China is that most people now seem to think that the Clinton/Bush/Obama approach to U.S.-China trade policy was wrong — and as Sanders himself says, he agrees with that new consensus and dissented all along from the old consensus. And then Sanders goes on to say that not only was he right all along about the trading relationship, but he agrees that the People’s Republic is doing all kinds of bad stuff.

The Chinese government is surely guilty of many policies and practices that I oppose and that all Americans should oppose: the theft of technology, the suppression of workers’ rights and the press, the repression taking place in Tibet and Hong Kong, Beijing’s threatening behavior toward Taiwan, and the Chinese government’s atrocious policies toward the Uyghur people. The United States should also be concerned about China’s aggressive global ambitions. The United States should continue to press these issues in bilateral talks with the Chinese government and in multilateral institutions such as the UN Human Rights Council.

So what is the actual disagreement?

I think there clearly are real points of dispute. But it’s more helpful to try to name them than to discuss this in terms of “a new cold war — good or bad,” because I talk to a lot of people who are worried about cold war mentality precisely because they disagree with Sanders (and Donald Trump and Joe Biden) about trade and want to go back to the old consensus. Because after all, whatever the increased U.S.-China tensions are about, they don’t actually bear a lot of resemblance to the Soviet Cold War.

There’s no Chinese equivalent of foreign Communist parties

China is ruled by the Communist Party, which is very similar to how the Soviet Union was also ruled by the Communist Party.

But there’s a huge difference in that there were a bunch of formally independent countries in Eastern Europe that were all ruled by their own local Communist Party yet also fundamentally under the thumb of Moscow. The world saw in 1956 in Hungary and in 1968 in Czechoslovakia that these countries were not allowed to go non-Communist.

But then all these other countries around the world also had Communist parties. And those parties, like political parties everywhere, would try to gain power. The idea that any Communist victory anywhere would turn that country into a Soviet satellite turns out to have been mistaken as a long-term forecast, with China itself providing the key example. But we did also see in Cuba a marked tendency for Communist states to be in the Soviet sphere of influence even when not subject to the same kind of direct military coercion.

And while western Communist parties weren’t always uniformly pro-Soviet (see the “Eurocommunist” trend in Italy and Spain starting in the late-1970s), they often were. There was a Communist Party USA that got direct Soviet funding all through the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

This all created a sense, perhaps overblown, in the west that the Soviet Union was very literally trying to take over the world. There were all these Communist parties everywhere, and sometimes Communists took power, and the fear was that everyone would end up like Poland or at best like Yugoslavia.

There’s nothing really like that today. There’s no pro-Chinese mass political party in any major country, and it’s not even clear what a pro-Chinese ideology would look like. What we have instead are commercial relationships.

There are massive Sino-American business ties

If you see a western organization that’s being weirdly subservient to Beijing on some subject or other, it’s almost certainly not going to be a political party with ideological motives but a business corporation pursuing sales to the China market.

It’s Mercedes Benz that issued a groveling apology for quoting the Dalai Lama in a marketing Instagram post. During the Cold War, we got lots of spies movies about western intelligence agencies doing battle with their Soviet rivals. We got “The Hunt for Red October.” Nothing like that would be made in Hollywood today because studios want to get Chinese audiences into the theater to watch their comic book movies. Would Iron Man ever take an interest in Uighur concentration camps? Of course not. Marvel race-swapped The Ancient One so that he’s no longer Tibetan and then made up a bunch of rationalizations rather than admit that they didn’t want to piss off the PRC.

This is a dynamic that is very much in my “stuff about China that I find alarming” bucket, but it’s also totally different from anything that happened during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

U.S.-Soviet proxy conflicts were endemic

One of the worst things that happened during the Cold War is that all kinds of localized political disputes turned into real or imagined U.S.-Soviet proxy battles. If you were a dictator somewhere doing bad stuff and you wanted Western approval to crack down on your opponents, you just had to say they were Communists. And if you were fighting someone with Western support and wanted foreign aid, you just had to declare yourself a Communist.

So the United States wound up actively supporting some of the worst regimes in the world from Mobutu in Congo to the Duvaliers in Haiti based on dubious anti-Communist logic, while the Soviets had their own armed proxies hither and yon.

Anyone doing a coup anywhere just had to pick a Cold War team and get support, and civil wars around the world tended to attract a self-propelling logic. America was pouring weapons into supporting Afghan rebels because the Soviets were supporting the official regime. The Soviets kept pouring in troops to support the regime because America was backing the rebels.

In Syria, we recently got a taste of this kind of dynamic as Russia and Iran strongly backed Assad while the Gulf monarchies and Turkey and occasionally the United States backed various kinds of opposition groups. Wars with external backers are difficult to settle and get tons of people killed. But since 1991, we’ve seen a great diminution of this kind of violence. This chart from Max Roser shows both the post-1991 decline and the Syria-related partial resurgence.

Short of like an actual major war between superpowers, this is what strikes me as the most worrisome possibility for U.S.-China relations.

So far, though, there’s no real sign of this in the offing. There’s a lot of political instability in Haiti right now, for example, but nobody is talking about a pro-PRC party seizing power or how the United States needs to back “our son of a bitch” to stop him. Contentious political situations in El Salvador, Venezuela, Cuba, and Peru similarly do not have this quality. Indeed it’s actually still Russia that we associate with this kind of thing, both in Syria and Libya. Slow Boring is very committed to following the Chad beat, and there too it’s mysterious Russian “tourists” who are showing up, not Chinese ones.

To the extent people are saying “let’s not fight a sprawling series of proxy wars with China” then I am really on board with that. America’s enthusiasm for that sort of thing during the Cold War was not very moral or strategically thoughtful, we are fortunate that so far the Chinese seem to eschew it themselves, and we should try to emulate that.

How bad is heavy military spending?

One of the specific concerns that Sanders raised in his piece is that the China threat is being cynically manipulated by the military-industry complex to bolster the case for bloated Pentagon spending.

That seems 100% true. At the same time, these same forces also managed to turn the fear that Islamic extremists would hijack airplanes and crash them into skyscrapers into a pretext for bloated Pentagon spending. The China-related version of the argument at least makes some kind of sense.

My main objection to heavy anti-Chinese military spending is that free-riding allies are a real thing. I looked up military spending as a share of GDP in the region and found:

South Korea, 2.4%

Japan, 0.9%

Taiwan, 2.4%

India, 2.4%

Australia, 1.9%

The United States, by contrast, is at 3.4% of GDP. There are also more particular questions about what the money is being spent on. People who seem more knowledgeable than I tell me that Taiwan’s conscription system is very poorly managed and also that a lot of their spending goes toward buying high-end equipment from the U.S. (because U.S. defense contractors are a key pro-Taiwan lobbying element) rather than buying the kinds of things that would actually be most useful in defending a medium-sized island from an amphibious assault.

I don’t think you can look at this landscape and conclude that the issue in the Pacific military balance of power is that the United States needs to spend more money. We should do what we have to do to make friendly states in the region feel like seeking to defend themselves is not futile. But it doesn’t make sense for us to care more about Chinese regional domination than they do.

Separately from this, I think progressives should ask themselves exactly how bad excessive military sending is. When I was a kid and Sanders was a junior House member in the 1990s, there was intense economic concern about the budget deficit. Insisting that a hefty share of deficit reduction comes from the “peace dividend” was an effective way of helping domestic programs avert larger cuts. But when defense spending went down in Obama’s second term, that was part of an across-the-board austerity agenda that was economically harmful. Under Trump, Congress cut deals to lift the sequester, and both military and non-military spending went up. That, it seems to me, was good.

We should not let concern about China deprive us of funds for useful domestic spending. But whether or military spending actually crowds out or crowds in domestic spending depends on the situation.

A little competition can be good

It personally struck me as a little odd that the Endless Frontier Act went from “we should invest in science!” to “we should invest in science to beat China!” to “as long we’re beating China we should also attach this bill about shark fin soup!” but all things considered it doesn’t strike me as the worst thing in the world if the spirit of competition with China makes members of Congress want to invest in scientific research.

I’m a little perturbed that in the wake of huge pandemic-induced problems with kids’ education, the only school-related thing we seem to be debating right now is “Critical Race Theory” bills that everyone seems to agree will have little positive or negative impact on kids’ math or reading ability.

Republicans, obviously, feel like they have a winning issue here, so they want to keep pressing it. But to the extent that Republicans are seriously concerned about China, that might make them get a little less interested in wedge issues and a little more interested in strategies for improving students’ learning. Democrats worrying about China might help them appreciate why many Americans feel that some kind of patriotic education is important, but Republicans sharing these worries in a sincere way could also understand why many liberals are so insistent that we need to find a way to make that an inclusive patriotic vision.

In general, the story I would tell here is that partisan political competition is zero-sum, but policymaking is not zero-sum.

So to the extent that American political elites see themselves as competing with Chinese political elites rather than political elites in the other party, that makes them more likely to find win-win compromises. Now of course this is exactly the logic anti-anti-China people use — they want win-win compromises with China rather than zero-sum competition. I’d like that too. But it is genuinely the case that the values gap between Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy is a lot smaller than the gap between either of them in Xi Jinping.

Stay chill, but vigilant

I am most of all struck by the point Sanders makes that during the big China/trade debates of 1999-2000, the establishment view was that increased U.S.-China commercial ties would set off a virtuous cycle where “the liberalization of China’s economy would be accompanied by the liberalization of China’s government with regard to democracy and human rights.”

I took a class on “Globalization and Its Discontents” in college a little bit after these debates, and the professor, the late Stanley Hoffman, argued vigorously against that idea.

But even he wasn’t pessimistic enough about it. The general sense that computers and the internet would be a liberatory technology was in the air. But while computers and the internet are great, they’ve mostly turned out to be a massive boon to surveillance. In America, that’s mostly surveillance for the purpose of sending you targeted ads. But on “Line of Duty,” the British cops are frequently using cell phone tracking data — or a suspect’s suspicious decision to turn the phone off and leave it at home — to make cases. In China, facial recognition technology and other advances are letting them build the world’s most powerful surveillance state.

This is an objectively worrying situation. And while the proponents of trade integration are the ones who were wrong about this, the problem is that slapping tariffs on Chinese products doesn’t actually address it. It’s turned out to be possible for the PRC to build a much richer, much more technologically advanced society than they had 25 years ago while seemingly becoming more rather than less repressive.

I don’t want us to freak out and overreact to that. The odds seem decent that the Chinese growth model will stall out, that their demographics will collapse, or both, and as I’ve said in the piece, it’s not like they are roaming the world toppling governments. But the fundamentally conceptual underpinning of our longtime strategy for dealing with China turned out to be wrong. That’s a big deal. If you don’t think it calls specifically for large increases in military spending, I’m inclined to agree. But I think it’s more constructive to actually make that case in specific terms rather than act like China-related concerns are invalid or anyone raising them is creating a “new Cold War.”