Beijing can’t make sense of Biden’s China strategy. Can Biden?

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Five months into the Biden administration, we have yet to see much of its China strategy beyond what former President Donald Trump put in place.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that the U.S.-China relationship will be “competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be.” However, the boundaries between each facet of this strategic envelope are not defined. Beijing apparently can’t make sense of this ambiguity. One can only hope President Joe Biden can, or the country will fall further behind in the competition with China.

A good way to gauge how the Chinese government perceives the ambiguity of U.S. strategy is to look at the coverage in its state-controlled media. This is modeled closely after the Soviet propaganda machinery. And the recent behavior of Chinese propagandists suggests that leaders in Beijing are unsure about where Biden’s China strategy is going. China appears to be holding off on a counterpunch.

In a classic 1950 book, Public Opinion in Soviet Russia, sociologist Alex Inkeles offered a lucid explanation for the Soviet concept of the press. In the eyes of a Soviet newspaper editor, events were regarded as news not when they were timely but when they were meaningfully related to the “process” of building up the Soviet society. Pravda, the Soviet Union’s newspaper, once spent a week talking about a biology conference because the scientists met to affirm the communist ideology. If the “process” was not there yet, the reporting of some events, no matter how timely, would be held off.

My chart below shows the coverage of U.S.-China relations in the People’s Daily, the Pravda of China, when and before the last four U.S. presidents took office. From the five months before Biden’s election to the five months after the inauguration, China’s mouthpiece went unusually silent on the new administration, compared to Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush.

Chart on Chinese propaganda and Joe Biden


The Soviet theory offers two explanations for China’s silence on the Biden White House.

First, Beijing is sure about Washington’s China policy but unsure about how to react. But this should be easily ruled out. It clearly knows how to handle a Trump-style China policy; it has been doing that for the last four years. That leaves us the second explanation. While China understands that Biden’s own China strategy will eventually emerge, it’s unsure what it will look like. Hence the decision to wait and see rather than to address it in the propaganda. Could this apparent uncertainty be an advantage for the United States?

Maybe, if the Biden administration truly has an effective China strategy to unveil. But recent developments suggest otherwise.

The U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, which has passed the Senate and is backed by the White House, is perhaps the closest we have seen to an emerging new China strategy. Primarily an industrial policy package, the $250 billion bill would drastically expand the federal government’s role in subsidizing “strategic sectors,” such as semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and robotics — areas seen as most threatened by China’s rise.

The strategy might work if the U.S. was playing catch-up with a country on the cutting edge of each sector and if the U.S. government was prepared to help domestic companies obtain foreign expertise and even steal intellectual property. We know this because it’s precisely what Beijing has done with its “Made in China 2025” industrial policy. But America is not China, and it would be a fatal mistake to equate competing with China with imitating what China does. Doing so would risk the advantageous U.S. position as the world’s chief innovator, whose ideas are turned into products by vibrant private sectors both domestically and internationally.

Because the U.S. and Chinese economies are so irreversibly intertwined, meeting the China challenge requires U.S. policymakers to strike a fine balance between the “romantic engagement” since China joined the World Trade Organization and the “divorce” the Trump administration entertained. The clock is ticking for Biden to formulate a plan.

Weifeng Zhong is a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a core developer of the open-sourced Policy Change Index project, which uses machine-learning algorithms to predict authoritarian regimes’ major policy moves by “reading” their propaganda.

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