Despite repeated efforts, the Biden administration has been unable to convince Beijing to cooperate on issues that seem like obvious fits for the two countries. Joe Biden, the Vice President of the United States, has made combating climate change a priority since his first year in office. However, the United States’ requests have been ignored for the last two years. The Chinese government has made it clear that the climate change problem is intertwined with the wider U.S.-China relationship, despite repeated trips and pronouncements by U.S. climate envoy John Kerry.
Washington has lately made it plain that it hopes Beijing would help it fight narcotics, especially fentanyl, which has become an expanding societal concern in the United States. Biden’s “compartmentalization” approach, expressed in these two initiatives, holds that U.S.-Chinese collaboration on some subjects can be kept distinct from the broader struggle between the two countries, to everyone’s benefit.
But the strategy of isolating China has failed, and a Wall Street Journal piece published only this month looked to sound its death knell. According to the article, if Beijing takes action against fentanyl, the Biden administration may consider removing sanctions on a police forensics lab accused of human rights breaches in Xinjiang region. The Biden administration has made a humiliating policy about-face, but it comes as no surprise.
At first glance, it may seem reasonable to separate topics like climate change and global health into separate silos. After all, I can see no good reason to disagree with you. COVID-19 made it very evident that in today’s linked world, it is not sufficient to rely just on domestic measures to protect populations against pandemics. The world’s shared resources must be maintained in some fashion. While they are engaged in geopolitical competition, why don’t major nations work together to solve these problems?
However, separating China into separate categories is pointless as long as Beijing pursues what it has called “unrestricted warfare,” which transcends the traditional boundaries of war and peace. Two People’s Liberation Army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, initially used the phrase in 1996 to describe their vision for how China might beat a technologically superior foe using a wide range of nontraditional techniques. In order to compensate for a military deficit, several strategies are used, such as cyberwarfare, economic warfare, and media infiltration. This month, the Center for Strategic and International Studies released a study in which they called China’s “aggressive and unprecedented political warfare campaign” out of the ordinary. This campaign included espionage, offensive cyber operations, social media deception, economic pressure, and irregular military action. All of these seemingly unrelated actions are part of a larger strategy to weaken the United States’ ability and resolve to challenge China.