Beijing

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.

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.

No one now denies that Hong Kong is a fiefdom of Beijing. Its democratic leaders have been packed off to prison on spurious grounds or have left the territory, and its street protests have long been beaten to pieces with batons. The 2020 national security law has made mockery of Hong Kong's last shreds of freedom of expression, rendering all criticism of the Chinese Communist Party akin to terrorism; and its uncensored homegrown newspapers are now closed by the state — their proprietors inexorably marched off to jail. Any pretense of adherence to the treaties signed by Britain and China around the time of the handover in 1997 — treaties that guaranteed Hong Kong autonomy — has long fallen away. Hong Kong is a subject province of the People's Republic now, and nothing more.

Nancy Pelosi, stock-trader extraordinaire, doubles as an adviser to America’s Olympic athletes. And her wise, nuanced advice to them is simple: “Shut up.” It would be a very bad idea, she says, to voice any political criticism at the games of the Chinese Communist Party or its glorious rule. You may have missed her similar advice to LeBron James, as he kissed the backside of Beijing’s dictators. You may have missed her critique of the NBA, as it protected its highly-profitable franchise in China. They were as compliant as any US multinational operating in Germany in the 1930s, eager to retain their profitable operations.

Fifteen years ago, I remarked to an acquaintance over lunch that it looked like China might eat America’s lunch in naval power. My interlocutor, a person well-known in leadership positions in the China studies community, scoffed at my comment. Over the next few years, he never missed an opportunity to ridicule my wild-eyed prediction. I often wonder what he thought in February 2021 when, less than a month after becoming president, Joe Biden warned US senators that if America didn’t “get moving, [China is] going to eat our lunch.” I claim no credit for prescience, just a historian’s sensitivity to trends over time. The fiftieth anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s visit to China falls in February 2022.

Anything short of a full boycott of the 2022 Beijing Olympics is an abdication of America’s responsibilities and a rejection of its values. Dispatching athletes to China in February would also violate the Olympic spirit. In a November 2 social media post, three-time Olympian Peng Shuai accused former Chinese vice premier Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault. That post was deleted within minutes and Peng promptly disappeared. The Chinese government has clearly seized control of her and her whereabouts, while Chinese state media has taken control of her story, releasing an email, purportedly from Peng, rescinding her allegations. It's also published photos, purportedly from her friends’ social media, as claimed evidence that she is happy and healthy.

It has been more than two years since Ziba Murat has heard the voice of her ailing mother, Gulshan Abbas, a retired physician who was abruptly ‘disappeared’ in September 2018 in Xinjiang province, China. While exact facts and figures are hard to come by, it is widely reported that at least three million Uighurs in China have been forced into concentration camps, which Beijing calls ‘reeducation’ facilities for stamping out ‘Islamic extremism’. The scale of the ongoing atrocities is bone-chilling: from forced sterilizations and sexual violence to beatings and indoctrination. The Chinese government’s assault extends to Uighurs abroad.