What Does China Think About the “New Cold War”?

While analysts disagree as to whether or not the United States and China are embarking on a new Cold War, there is wide consensus on one point: The bilateral relationship is the lowest it has been since the icebreaking Nixon-Mao meeting of 1972. Since the late Obama administration, tensions have grown across the board, on everything from cyberattacks to market access and from human rights to military rivalry. Then the COVID-19 pandemic – which originated in China, but has wreaked the most havoc in the United States – provided the long-awaited tipping point. The relationship (and the world) will never be the same.

The United States’ perspective on the relationship is obvious. The Trump administration labeled China a “strategic competitor” in its 2017 National Security Strategy. Since then, administration officials have made speech after speech decrying bad behavior from Beijing. They frame recent U.S. actions as a necessary course-correction after decades of letting China “take advantage of our goodwill,” as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo put it in a speech at the Virtual Copenhagen Democracy Summit on June 19. Under Trump, “America is engaging in a response to Chinese Communist Party and aggression [sic] in a way that America has not done for the past 20 years,” Pompeo added.

Speaking a week after Pompeo, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien was even more blunt: “America, under President Trump’s leadership, has finally awoken to the threat the Chinese Communist Party’s actions and the threat they pose to our very way of life [sic]… The days of American passivity and naivety regarding the People’s Republic of China are over.”

That certainly sounds Cold War-esque. But as the saying often goes, it takes two to tango. What does China think about the state of its relationship with the United States? Does it see itself in an ideologically motivated long-term competition for dominance?

In a series of high-profile speeches and articles from Chinese officials in June and July, we can get a clear sense of Beijing’s messaging on the topic.

First up was a lengthy article from Fu Ying, a former diplomat who currently serves as chair of the National People’s Congress Foreign Affairs Committee. Fu has become well known for her interactions with the English-speaking world, often serving as a prominent messenger for Chinese foreign policy abroad. But this article, written in Chinese, is aimed at a domestic audience, and so provides an interesting window into China’s thinking about the fractured relationship with the United States. Her main themes have since been repeated in other high-profile speeches, cementing their importance.

First, Fu was frank that she does see a global competition underway between the United States and China. But, in her telling, Washington is solely responsible; China is framed as a passive actor faced with President Donald Trump’s aggression. “The U.S. side’s persistent provocations forced China to react and take countermeasures, and Sino-U.S. relations experienced a rapid decline,” she summarized, saying the United States is being newly assertive on China’s “core issues” like Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang. Fu accused the Trump administration of trying to “provoke” competition with China on four fronts: ideology, propaganda (what Fu calls the “competition for public opinion”), the economic and financial spheres, and military competition.

Importantly, Fu’s article posited that the main cause of this stepped-up aggression is, essentially, U.S. jealously of China. China-U.S. relations are characterized by “one advancing, one retreating” – China is a rising power, and the United States is falling in this telling. That’s because China made good choices after the Cold War (in Fu’s words, it correctly “judged and grasped the theme of the times: world peace and development”) while the United States made bad ones (pursuing regime change and hegemony).

To sum up: The U.S.-China competition is real, and it’s all the United States’ fault due to envy over China’s rise amid its own decline.

Chinese diplomats have made some of these points – albeit with more effort toward reassurance – in speeches for a foreign audience. Foreign Minister Wang Yi delivered an address on the state of the bilateral relationship at the China-U.S. Think Tanks Media Forum on July 9. He largely agreed with Fu on the cause of the current frictions: Namely, that it’s the United States’ fault, and an attempt to keep China down. “Some in the U.S. with ideological biases are resorting to all possible means to portray China as an adversary, and even an enemy,” Wang said. “They seek relentlessly to frustrate and contain China's development, and to impede interactions between China and the U.S.”

He elaborated:

The current China policy of the U.S. is based on ill-informed strategic miscalculation, and is fraught with emotions and whims and McCarthyist bigotry. Its suspicion about China, totally uncalled-for, has reached a point of paranoia… its paranoia may turn into self-fulfilling prophecies at the end of the day.

Wang, however, also provided some key reassurances, all of which have been heard before but not emphasized recently. First, he denied that China is seeking to impose its own development model on others. “China does not replicate any model of other countries, nor does it export its own to others. We never ask other countries to copy what we do,” Wang said. Second, he stated outright that “China never intends to challenge or replace the U.S., or have full confrontation with the U.S.” He even quoted his boss on the subject: “President Xi Jinping has underlined on many occasions that we have a thousand reasons to make the China-U.S. relationship a success, and none whatsoever to wreck it.”

The problem, in the Chinese narrative, is that the United States does not reciprocate those reassurances. The United States is trying to export its model, and coerce or cajole other countries – including China – into embracing its own economic and political system. That, is a nonstarter for China, and has been since the founding of the People’s Republic. Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng complained about this tendency in his own speech about the relationship: “[W]hy does the U.S. always seek to change the other country in state-to-state relations? Why does it try to impose its own ideology on others?”

Likewise, Beijing may be sincere in insisting that it is not trying to “challenge or replace the U.S.” – although many U.S. analysts would contest that – but the Chinese government wholeheartedly believes the United States is attempting to “contain” or “suppress” China. Again, to quote Le, “For such a country [meaning China] that has done nothing but good deeds, the U.S. has chosen to turn a blind eye and go after it by all means, and even threatened to plunge China all the way back to what it was like 40 years ago. What malevolent intention!”

While Wang and Le both have suggestions for putting the U.S.-China relationship back “on track,” the onus for doing so falls completely on the United States. Wang offers a return to dialogue as the answer, essentially a reset to the pre-Trump status quo. Nowhere do the diplomats offer a policy change of China’s own, or a new approach to the relationship.

Most notably, Chinese diplomats tend to deny that the recent changes to the U.S.-China relationship will be long-lasting. While Fu, Wang, and Le all agree that the relationship is at a low point, there is a sense of historical inevitability about their view that the United States’ policy toward China is self-defeating and will be discarded eventually. Le’s speech was actually titled “The Trend Toward China-U.S. Cooperation is Unstoppable.”

A recent survey of 100 Chinese scholars on U.S.-China relations, done by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University, sheds a bit more light on this. Of the scholars surveyed, 62 percent “believe that the U.S. is indeed waging a new cold war against China,” versus 35 percent who disagree. However, tellingly, 82 percent don’t believe that “a new cold war like the U.S.-Soviet one is likely between China and the U.S.” In other words, most of those who believe the United States seeks a “new cold war” also believe such an effort is impossible. As one scholar put it, “At the bilateral level, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had completely decoupled. By comparison, the interests of China and the U.S. are so intertwined at foundational levels of trade, finance, education, counterterrorism, and global public security.”

Perhaps most revealing of all, a full 90 percent of the scholars “believe that China is capable of coping well with the new cold war offensive by the U.S.” Only 6 percent disagree.

That same confidence – that a full-on return to the Cold War is impossible, and that even if it comes to pass China will manage just fine – imbues the perspectives offered by Fu, Wang, and Le. The new Cold War is viewed almost a passing phase, rather than the way the Trump administration frames it: as a new awakening to a fundamental reality.

Washington seems ready for a Cold War redux; Beijing is still attempting to talk its way out of one. What neither side seems ready to do is change its own behavior to avoid one.