China and Russia are making common cause at a time when Donald Trump’s America is turning its back on the world. Are we seeing the beginning of a global partnership? Or is this only a marriage of convenience? Experts disagree. (more…)
Tag: Sino-American Relations
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China and Russia: True Love or Marriage of Convenience?
Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China meet in Benaulim, India, October 15, 2016 (Kremlin) -
Trump Cedes Initiative to China and Russia
- Edward Luce argues in the Financial Times that Donald Trump is allowing China to take the lead in artificial intelligence and robotics. Whereas Trump is sabotaging his own country’s edge by proposing to cut investment spending, reduce visas for high-skilled migrants and pulling out of the Trans Pacific Partnership, China is spending generously, drawing in foreign talent and developing its “One Belt and One Road” trade initiative.
- Michael Crowley reports for Politico that Trump is ceding postwar planning in Syria to Vladimir Putin, allowing not only Russia but Iran to maintain a foothold in the Eastern Mediterranean. The effect: Egypt and Turkey, once bulwarks of American influence in the Middle East, are eying an entente with Moscow.
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Mar-a-Lago Summit Overshadowed by Syria Strikes
Chinese president Xi Jinping attends the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 17 (WEF/Valeriano Di Domenico) The recent summit between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping was unprecedented in its fashion and noteworthy in several respects.
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida was an unusual venue for the first meeting between the two most powerful men on the planet. Barack Obama’s summits with the Chinese president were more formal.
The summit was expected to shed light on the policies of both leaders toward various smoldering issues: North Korea, Taiwan, territorial disputes in the South China Sea and Sino-American trade relations. (more…)
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Stop Reading Masterplans into Donald Trump’s Mistakes
British prime minister Theresa May speaks with American president Donald Trump the Oval Office of the White House in Washington DC, January 27 (10 Downing Street/Jay Allen) Donald Trump’s first weeks as president have been so shambolic, it is almost hard to believe he can really be so incompetent.
Indeed, some refuse to. From his misguided attacks on the judiciary to his botched diplomacy with China, these are observers who read masterplans into Trump’s puerile behavior.
Please don’t.
If there is one thing we have learned about Trump, it’s that he is self-absorbed and ill-tempered. He had no political experience before seeing the presidency and now surrounds himself in the White House with sycophants and zealots, as opposed to critical thinkers and professionals.
The more likely explanation for his mistakes is that they are just that: mistakes. (more…)
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Remember Trump’s “One China” Threat? It Was a Stupid Bluff
Remember when Donald Trump, then newly elected, accepted a phone call from the president of Taiwan and his apologists told us it was all part of a masterplan? If it meant revising the “One China” policy, they said, well, maybe that needed revising anyway? Who’s China to say which countries America can and cannot recognize!
My interpretation was that Trump was simply ignorant of the sensitivities of Sino-Americans relations and had blundered his way into a diplomatic incident.
Trump’s first phone call with the president of China, Xi Jinping, supports that contention.
The White House’s readout of the conversation, which took place on Thursday, says, “Trump agreed, at the request of President Xi, to honor our ‘One China’ policy.” (more…)
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Uncertainty in China as Trump Takes Office
Guangzhou, China at night, September 16, 2013 (Johnas) This weekend, more than a billion Chinese will gather with their families to celebrate the Chinese New Year and the Year of the Rooster. It is a lively tradition, the biggest family celebration in the year and, like New Year’s Eve in the West, it breathes the magic of the new.
But with the inauguration of the new American president, Donald Trump, it is even more unpredictable what this new year will bring. (more…)
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World Upside Down: China Defends Globalization from America
Chinese president Xi Jinping attends the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 17 (WEF/Valeriano Di Domenico) Chinese president Xi Jinping defended globalization in an address to the World Economic Forum on Tuesday, likening the world’s interconnectedness to a “big ocean that you cannot escape from.”
Xi didn’t mention Donald Trump, but his speech sounded like a warning to the incoming American president.
“Pursuing protectionism is just like locking one’s self in a dark room,” Xi said: “Wind and rain might be kept outside but so are light and air.”
He also warned that “no one would emerge as a winner” from a trade war.
Trump has called for higher tariffs on imported goods and measures against what he calls unfair Chinese trade practices. (more…)
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Why Taiwan Could (Still) Start World War III
An American B-52 Stratofortress bomber leads a formation of American and Japanese fighter jets over Guam, February 21, 2011 (USAF/Angelita M. Lawrence) Surely you know already the tripwire: Taiwan is a de facto country but a de jure province of mainland China. The people’s republic wants to bring it back under mainland China’s rule while the people of Taiwan want exactly the opposite.
Moreover, Taiwan’s military security is guaranteed by the United States via the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which stipulates the United States must respond militarily to a communist invasion.
So if the PRC tries to bring Taiwan back into the fold by military force, the United States must retaliate. Conventional battles turn to nuclear battles and then we all die in the irradiated glow of our own monstrous weapons. (more…)
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The Giant Awakes: America Begins to Reclaim Top Spot
Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Barack Obama of the United States speak at Sunnylands in Rancho Mirage, California, June 8, 2013 (White House/Pete Souza) Here now is the predictability of geopolitics coming to the top of the news cycle: when you are top dog, you don’t take kindly to anyone trying to tear you down.
In the last week the United States, an empire in all but name, has struck back against its chief rivals. The first occurred in the disputed South China Sea where Beijing has constructed whole islands right in the middle of heavily-trafficked and potentially resource-rich waves. China’s plan was to extend its sea claim outwards from these islands, but the United States thwarted that scheme by sending a warship directly into China’s no-gone zone.
Meanwhile, in Syria’s murderous civil war, Russia’s deployment of bombers and tanks has now begun to be matched with the public announcement America is sending forces to fight in Iraq and to train allies in Syria.
In other words, the empire is striking back. But it’s playing by some well-defined rules as it does. (more…)
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American Bomber Overflights Challenge Chinese Air Control
An American B-52 Stratofortress bomber leads a formation of American and Japanese fighter jets over Guam, February 21, 2011 (USAF/Angelita M. Lawrence) America sent a strong signal on Tuesday of its position in a territorial dispute between China and Japan when it conducted bomber overflights of the Senkaku Islands. The island chain has been at the center of tensions in the Sino-Japanese relationship for some years and lies at the heart of an Air Defense Identification Zone that China declared just days ago.
Chinese authorities’ announcement of the ADIZ unilaterally requires all aircraft wishing to operate within a broad zone of the East China Sea to register their flight plans and other identifying information ahead of time. Failure to comply would, according to the government in Beijing, lead to proportionate responses from its armed forces. The implication being that this applies to the military and merchant aircraft that regularly service and patrol the Senkaku Islands which are administered by Japan and known in China as the Diaoyu Islands. (more…)
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China’s Xi, American Secretary Discuss Currency, Korea
China’s new paramount leader Xi Jinping met with American treasury secretary Jack Lew in Beijing on Tuesday in what was his first meeting with a foreign official since being formally named president last week.
According to American officials, the two men discussed the major issues between their countries: the state of the global economy, China’s currency, cyber hacking, intellectual property rights and North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. It was the highest level meeting between American and Chinese officials since Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta visited Beijing in September.
Lew was reportedly “candid and direct” on North Korea. The United States want China to enforce tougher sanctions enacted by the United Nations Security Council after the country conducted a nuclear test in February. There is doubt about China’s commitment in following through. Because China is North Korea’s main ally, it has historically been reticent of pushing too hard on the regime for strategic reasons and a fear that should the government in Pyongyang collapse, a flow of refugees will seek shelter in China and destabilize the border region. (more…)
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China’s Shadow Looms Over Clinton’s Asian Trip
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in China on Tuesday for two days of meetings with top officials where she is expected to discuss a wide range of issues including the disputes between China and its neighbors over uninhabited islands in the South China Sea.
Clinton is on an eleven day, six nation trip to Asia that could be her last if she steps down at the end of the Obama Administration’s first term.
The visit is meant to convoy the United States’ commitment to the economic and security issues in Asia encapsulated in what the administration has dubbed the Asian “pivot.” The countries that Clinton visits highlight the strategic competition for influence that is underway between China and the United States in the region. (more…)
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United States Consider Drone Deployment to East China Sea
In what seemed a routine meeting between American defense secretary Leon Panetta and his Japanese counterpart Satoshi Morimoto last week, The Yomiuri Shimbun reports that the two allies agreed to “consider conducting surveillance” by unmanned spy aircraft over the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea.
Known as the Diaoyu Islands in China, the competing claims between the two Asian nations involve a deeply emotional issue and stir nationalist passions on both sides. It dates back to 1895 when Imperial Japan humiliated a weakened and divided China and took control of the islands.
After receding in importance in Sino-Japanese relations for most of the last century, during which China was alternately grappling with internal strife and civil war, the dispute flared up again in 2010 when a Chinese fishing trawler crashed into a Japanese coast guard vessel.
The Chinese captain was arrested which fueled a nationalist outrage in China. After two weeks of escalating tensions, which saw China suspend all senior level meetings with Japan, encouraged its citizens to cancel trips to the country and suspend the export of rare earth minerals, Japan relinquished and released the captain.
Concerned about China’s possible future actions over the islands, Japan and the United States have been elevating their level of cooperation diplomatically and militarily since.
At the Pentagon last Friday, the two countries announced the eventual deployment of the Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey aircraft to Okinawa “to enable Marines to fly faster and farther… to remote islands in Japan.” The Osprey is a tiltrotor aircraft, giving it the ability to land like a helicopter and fly with the speed and range of a fixed-wing aircraft.
Morimoto also said that Japan is moving forward with its “dynamic defense cooperation” with the United States which will mean even closer ties between the two militaries and the establishment of joint training on Guam and Northern Mariana.
For its part, China has seen escalating tensions with its other neighbors over the disputed islands in the South China Sea. The United States have also deepened their security relationships with Australia, the Philippines, and Vietnam in that area.
Thus, the announcement last week at the Pentagon and speculation about the deployment of American drones to the Far East, while reaffirming the support of an important American ally in Japan, promises to add to the tensions with China across the region.