Beijing

When Xi Jinping visited North Korea in June 2019 for his first state visit, he would not have expected nearly seven years later that the hermit kingdom would be in an alliance with Russia. As Xi concluded his second visit to the country yesterday, the Chinese president’s pledges to "strengthen strategic coordination" and "uphold regional peace and development" with his North Korean counterpart emphasized how Beijing wants to ensure that its northeastern neighbor does not cross any red lines. With Beijing having been Pyongyang’s largest economic partner for nearly two decades, Xi’s visit serves as a clear reminder to North Korea that China wants to maintain close ties and, crucially, ensure stability on the Korean Peninsula.

For all the talk about artificial intelligence and quantum supremacy, the fate of civilizations still depends on breakfast. ChatGPT can’t grow corn. Empires rise on stomachs as much as on silicon. And America’s food system – long dismissed as safe and self-sufficient – has quietly become a front line in the US-China rivalry. We act as if lunch is inevitable, but Beijing knows that food is power. A new report from the America First Policy Institute should wake us up. Washington long treated agriculture as a post-political space where globalization could do no harm, and was therefore happy to let much of the nation ship its growth to China. As Ambassador Kip Tom and Royce Hood argue, China has thus taken over critical pieces of the US agricultural system and food supply.

China has been an epicenter of diplomacy over the last month and American officials can’t help but take notice of the shift. Statesmen flying to China, hat in hand, to sign business deals with Chinese firms or enlist Chinese diplomats to assist in solving international disputes gives the foreign policy graybeards ulcers. The general rule seems to be: what’s good for China is bad for the United States. There’s no question that China’s Xi Jinping has had a good few weeks. After being occupied with a nationwide Covid-19 disaster that lasted for three years, Xi, a man whose entire legacy depends on China transforming into a superpower on par with or perhaps even surpassing the US, isn’t wasting any time before injecting his country back into the diplomatic arena.

Well, well, well. The world seems amazed at the news that the Chinese spy balloon that meandered over the entire continental United States this winter was, you know, spying. That’s what spy balloons do: they spy. They collect intelligence — in this case, information from some of America’s most sensitive sites (I was going to say “secure sites,” but that would clearly be inaccurate). What do they do then? Like bees collecting pollen, they transmit what they collected back to the hive, which, mirabile dictu, just happens to be located in Beijing.  Anyone who was paying attention knew this. Did secretary of state Antony Blinken? Did puppet-in-chief Joe “Chocolate-Chip” Biden? Probably.

It has been a bumpy week for China’s beleaguered technology giants. They are under increasing scrutiny overseas, and the communist party continues to tighten the screws on them at home. In many ways they are also their own worst enemies. The UK has become the latest government to ban the Chinese-owned TikTok from government devices over security concerns. Parliament has also banned the app from its network. This follows similar bans from the European Union and 11 countries, including France, New Zealand, Denmark and the US. Western lawmakers are unconvinced by TikTok’s often cack-handed attempts to distance itself from its Chinese parent, ByteDance, and that company’s obligations to the Chinese communist party.

The bilateral relationship between the United States and China is arguably the most important in the world today. The two countries make up approximately 42 percent of the world’s economic output and more than half of global military expenditure (at $801 billion, the US share of that total dwarfs China’s). The Biden administration’s recently released National Security Strategy names China as "the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it." The central objective from Washington’s standpoint is to compete vigorously with Beijing, prevent China from attaining hegemonic status in the Asia-Pacific, and ensure this competition doesn’t slide into conflict.

The year 2008 was consequential by many measures. The collapse of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers sparked a worldwide financial crisis. Yet China appeared to emerge out of it relatively unscratched after Beijing introduced a massive stimulus package in the world, about three times the size of the United States government's rescue program. Thanks to this expansionary fiscal policy and the easy credit that came with it, the Chinese economy quickly returned to its robust growth by growing 8.7 percent in 2009 and 10.4 percent in 2010. After 2008, the Chinese Communist Party leaders concluded that China "escaped" the financial crisis because of its outstanding leadership and the superiority of the Chinese political system over deeply flawed western democracies.