Xi jinping

In becoming the highest-ranking American politician to visit Taiwan in a quarter-century, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has become the dominant foreign affairs news story of the month, eclipsing, if briefly, Russia’s war in Ukraine. Yet beyond all the sound and fury, Pelosi’s trip changed nothing in the cross-Strait balance of power. What it did was to legitimize the “mission creep” bringing Taiwan and America closer together. Both supporters and critics of the trip were quick to invest Pelosi’s visit with major symbolic significance.

House speaker Nancy Pelosi has always had a flair for the dramatic. During the Trump presidency, for example, she ostentatiously tore up his State of the Union speech. But for sheer spectacle, it will be hard for Pelosi to top her “will she, won’t she” visit to Taiwan this week. In spite of the suspense, there was never really any doubt about it. For weeks China has issued dire warnings about the perils of her visit. So, as it happens, have several commentators, including The Spectator’s Freddy Gray, whom I debated on the Americano podcast, and who seems to have a bad case of the collywobbles about the Pelosi trip.

The Biden administration is increasingly concerned about a trip to Taiwan next month by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And they should be. The visit is pointlessly provocative for little gain. Pelosi would do well to remember the Chinese proverb: "Always know if the juice is worth the squeeze." The domestic political juice is charm points for Pelosi from her large, pro-Taiwan constituency back home as she runs for reelection. A third of Pelosi’s congressional district is Asian-American and taking on Big China has long been a major part of her political identity. She, for example, made a public show out of meeting with pro-democracy protesters from Hong Kong and urging a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

“Fighting corruption is not just good governance,” Joe Biden once said. “It is self-defense. It is patriotism, and it’s essential to the preservation of our democracy and our future.” Going into the first term of his presidency, President Obama gave then-Vice President Biden one of the most important foreign policy portfolios: managing the US relationship with China. However, there is precious little to show for this prodigious assignment.

If Asia has entered the debate over the war in Ukraine, it is primarily through questions over the role China is purported to be playing in supporting Russia. Given the now-infamous declaration of a “partnership without limits” by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping during the Beijing Olympics just weeks before the invasion, many observers have searched for signs of Chinese aid, military or economic, to Russia in the conflict. The scope of devastation in Ukraine and the probable war crimes being committed by Russian troops understandably mean less attention has been paid to how the conflict might affect geopolitical stability in the Indo-Pacific region. The exception is Taiwan — there has been considerable speculation over the influence of Ukraine on Beijing’s calculations there.

China is tacitly backing Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. The Biden administration should combat this by imposing economic costs on China through the corporate Environmental, Social and Governance disclosure requirements that are already in place. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin met in February at the Beijing Olympics, their thirty-eighth visit in the nine years since Xi took power. In a 5,000-word statement on February 4, Xi and Putin proclaimed their friendship with “no limits” and “no forbidden areas of cooperation.” Just weeks before the invasion, China signed agreements to buy from Russia energy and agricultural products worth over $200 billion.

From last fall, in an extension of a personality cult not seen since Mao Zedong, “Xi Jinping Thought” is being incorporated into China’s national curriculum. School textbooks are emblazoned with Xi’s smiling face, together with heartwarming slogans telling readers as young as six that their leader is watching over them. “Grandpa Xi Jinping is very busy with work, but no matter how busy he is, he still joins in our activities and cares about our growth,” reads one. “Xi Jinping Thought” must be taught at all levels of education, from elementary school to graduate programs, and there is special emphasis on capturing the minds of the youngest children.

History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. In the 1980s, the gravest threat to America’s freedoms came from the Soviet Union, which President Ronald Reagan called the Evil Empire. That rhymes with today’s equally serious threat from Communist China, the New Evil Empire. Xi Jinping rules China with absolute power, like an emperor. He has complete control over China’s sole political party, the CCP, the government, the economy, the military, the police, the judiciary, and the media. Even over religion: Christian churches must display Xi quotes instead of the Ten Commandments.

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.

As recently as a week ago, there was talk that Monday night’s virtual summit between President Joe Biden and Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping was an opportunity to “reset” the US-China relationship. By the time the two leaders sat down in front of their video screens, the summit had been downgraded to a “meeting” and the White House made clear that little concrete agreement, and no breakthrough, was to be expected. The meeting lived down to expectations, uneasily combining a more sober and realistic US assessment of the parlous state of bilateral ties with what seems a return to a pre-2017 model of surface bonhomie and references to the “the long-term work that we need to do together,” according to a senior US official.

China in late September celebrated the 2,572nd birthday of Confucius, a mark of pride for the Chinese Communist Party. A week later, it celebrated its 72nd “National Day,” commemorating the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Chinese President Xi Jinping regularly gushes over Confucius in speeches and even in his 2015 book. Since 2004, the Chinese government has sponsored more than 500 “Confucius Institutes” — public educational and cultural promotion programs — to the price tag of billions of dollars. But how Confucian is China? And is Confucian statecraft a good thing?

The Chinese Communist party’s origin story, like so many of its official lines, appears to be an apocryphal tale. But a month-long patriotic extravaganza leading up to its centennial celebration has featured military parades, skyscrapers emblazoned with hammer-and-sickle decor and propaganda blitzes on TV. None of the agitprop raised eyebrows as much as the main speech delivered by the Chinese president and general secretary of the party, Xi Jinping, in which he marked the milestone and praised China’s ‘tremendous transformation’ and the historical inevitability of its ‘national rejuvenation’.

When future historians chronicle the period after the Cold War, the rise of China will dominate their accounts. Beginning in the 2000s, China unleashed a flood of state-sponsored manufactures, many of them produced by western multinational corporations using Chinese labor on Chinese soil. This impoverished much of the already pressured industrial working class in the US and Europe, triggering populist revolts in rustbelts like the American Midwest, the north of England and eastern Germany. The recycling of profits from China’s chronic trade surpluses through the global financial system enriched western financial interests and helped to inflate bubbles in the real estate and stock markets. These burst in 2008, causing the Great Recession.