NEW HAVEN – Other than a few glib remarks, surprisingly little was said about China at this month’s US presidential debate. Former President Donald Trump asserted that his proposed import tariffs would punish “China and all of the countries that have been ripping us off for years.” Vice President Kamala Harris, for her part, disparaged China’s pandemic response, stating that President Xi Jinping “was responsible for lacking and not giving us transparency about the origins of COVID.”

The failure to focus on China was in one sense predictable. US voters have been largely fixated on other anxieties during this election cycle: abortion and women’s reproductive rights, immigration and border security, and inflation and pocketbook issues. The moderators and their preselected line of questioning did little to probe what could well be America’s most consequential foreign-policy issue of the twenty-first century, even though the Commission on the National Defense Strategy and the White House’s National Security Strategy have elevated China risks to near existential status. A failure to address this issue made no sense. 

China has invariably been an important topic of discussion in past campaigns, starting with the October 1960 debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, which featured an extended back and forth over the disputed islands of Quemoy and Matsu in the Taiwan Strait. Almost all subsequent presidential debates, including the three encounters between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, have included exchanges on Sino-American relations. (Trump’s constant references to “Chai-nah” that year were even the subject of a viral video.) Is the American electorate so overwhelmed by polarized social-media discourse and the 24-hour news cycle that it has lost its appetite for substantive policy discussions?

Of course, both parties’ agreement on the severity of the China threat may also explain their inclination to ignore it. Moreover, given the tendency of US politicians to blame others for problems of their own making, the shared scapegoating of China is hardly surprising. A case in point is blaming China for America’s massive trade deficit, which is an outgrowth of an equally massive budget deficit and a concomitant shortfall in domestic saving. The same can be said of US paranoia over Huawei, the poster child of the Sino-American tech war – it is far easier to blame China than to acknowledge that inadequate spending on research and development is a risk to America’s innovation potential.

No, I am not naive enough to expect US politicians to come clean on contentious issues like China. The political expediency of false narratives, as I stress in my book Accidental Conflict, has reached a new level in the 2024 presidential campaign. Consider Trump’s tariff fixation: he misrepresents not only who pays for them but reverses their impact, arguing incorrectly that tariffs will cut inflation at home while raising prices for foreign exporters.

At the same time, one can criticize Harris for embracing the Biden administration’s decision to maintain Trump’s China tariffs and impose new ones. As I have argued ad nauseam, going after China without addressing the root cause of America’s domestic-savings shortfall is like squeezing a water balloon: the pressure merely forces the water to the other end. Likewise, the supposed bilateral fix (tariffs on China) has simply diverted the US trade deficit to Mexico, Vietnam, Canada, South Korea, Taiwan, India, Ireland, and Germany – largely higher-cost producers, which boosts prices for hard-pressed American families. But try telling that to a US politician these days.

So, if it were up to me, I would attempt draw out the candidates on three key pieces of the China puzzle:

First, can the US really hope to eliminate a multilateral trade deficit (with 106 countries in 2023) by targeting its largest trading partner? The government tried that with Japan in the 1980s and failed, so why do politicians think this same approach will now miraculously work with China?

Second, what are the chances that this trade war will backfire? It has happened before, with the Great Depression of the 1930s being the most painful example. When countries are hit with tariffs, they tend to retaliate. When companies are singled out by sanctions, they focus on competitive survival. Huawei’s new generation of smartphones and laptops could be viewed as especially striking examples of this.

Third, what would victory in a Sino-American trade war look like for the US? Mutual concerns over national security have made conflict inevitable. Chinese leaders fear that America is pursuing a strategy of comprehensive containment, a claim that the US denies, arguing instead that it is creating a “small yard and a high fence” to protect sensitive technologies. Is there a compromise that might be more palatable to both countries? Engagement is not a four-letter word. Nor should it be mistaken for appeasement. What would it take to consider the possibility of a new era in US-China engagement?

These are not trick questions. I myself have taken a stab at answering them over the past several years. What most worries me is that incurious voters have no interest in probing these and other aspects of the China debate, let alone considering alternatives to conflict.

America is in the grips of a toxic Sinophobia that makes the first Cold War seem like a drill. Surely there is a better way to engage with China than seeing threats around every corner. It will be exceedingly difficult to find constructive solutions if US presidential candidates are not pushed to debate the country’s toughest problems.

Stephen S. Roach, a faculty member at Yale University and former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, is the author of Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China (Yale University Press, 2014) and Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives (Yale University Press, 2022).

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024.
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