Coronavirus: a contrarian view on why not all hope is lost for US-China ties

Fiery exchanges and a blame game over Covid-19 have some fretting about a full-on Cold War – or, worse, a hot one in the South China Sea
But with shared challenges looming – not least of them the prospect of a leadership crisis in North Korea – this may be a case of ‘fight, don’t break’

Wang Xiangwei

Published: 9:15am, 2 May 2020

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At a time when pundits debate how the coronavirus pandemic will reshape not only peoples’ lives around the world but also the international order, and try to make sense of mounting uncertainties, there seems to be one great certainty they agree on: That US-China relations are going from bad to worse. The world’s two largest economies have been at each other’s throats constantly ever since the pandemic started.

Despite the doom and gloom, however, it is too early to paint the intertwined and increasingly complicated bilateral ties in black and white from now onwards. I would like to offer a contrarian view that there is more than meets the eye as Beijing and Washington manoeuvre for a post-virus world.

Coronavirus: to save US lives, Trump must learn from China, not fight it

For the moment, media reports and commentaries have painted a stark picture.

Instead of seizing the opportunity to join hands to lead the campaign against a virus that has killed over 200,000 people and battered economies, Washington and Beijing have engaged in a dangerous game of blaming each other for their own early lapses and late responses in tackling the outbreak.

Washington appears to have gained an upper hand in the blame game. US President Donald Trump may have stopped calling the coronavirus the “China virus” or the “Chinese virus”, after he was criticised for stigmatising and encouraging racist and xenophobic attacks on Asian Americans, among other things, but senior officials including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other China hawks have been given a free rein in their relentless attacks on China – accusing Beijing of lying and spreading disinformation – and in withholding funding for the World Health Organisation which Washington has blasted for siding with China.

The US state of Missouri has filed a lawsuit against the Chinese government, alleging it had covered up and done little to stop the spread of the virus, and the state of Mississippi has said it will follow suit. Meanwhile in the US congress, members are reportedly working on several hundred pieces of legislation targeting China.

While none of the lawsuits or legislation is likely to bear fruit, they provide a barometer of the bipartisan hostilities towards China.

The latest survey by the widely respected Pew Research Centre showed that two thirds of those surveyed had an unfavourable view of China, the most since the centre first asked the question 15 years ago and a jump of 20 percentage points since Trump came to power in 2017, according to US media reports.

As the US election is just six months away, China will no doubt again become the target of demagoguery for the Republican and Democrat campaigns.

Beijing, disregarding the debacle in which it promoted a conspiracy theory that the US military could have brought the virus to China, has been aggressive at pushing back against the US accusations, blasting Pompeo and other US officials for lying through their teeth and spreading the equivalent of a political virus against China.

On Monday night, a commentary on China’s national prime-time news programme ratcheted up the rhetoric by labelling Pompeo “the public enemy of mankind” for the first time.

The fiery tones from both sides have spooked many analysts and businessmen who are increasingly worried that the already-fraught relations may propel the two countries into a fully fledged new Cold War or, even more ominously, a possible hot war, over the South China Sea where tensions are high and US and Chinese warships are flexing their muscles.

While those are valid reasons to be pessimistic, there are also reasons to suggest that Beijing and Washington are far from coming to blows despite the escalation in the war of words.

First of all, Beijing may have ramped up its propaganda machine to push back against Washington’s narrative but it has been very disciplined in not allowing the ties to spin out of control, as epitomised by an official saying on the great power relationship: “fight but do not break”. For instance, while Chinese officials and the state media may single out Pompeo or other China hawks such as Peter Navarro, a Trump adviser, for blistering attacks, they have taken special care not to mention Trump’s name directly when criticising his policies or his remarks against China. They refer to him as the US leader.

Coronavirus: people deserve the truth about China’s response

In return, Trump and his senior officials have refrained from naming President Xi Jinping in their swipes against the Chinese government. Even recently, Trump was still publicly calling Xi his friend.

Cynics may snigger but the fact remains that both Beijing and Washington have maintained open lines of communication on various levels, from top officials to state-level officials to medical professionals.

In late March, Xi and Trump pledged in a phone call to cooperate in the fight against the pandemic and even Pompeo, now derided in China’s official media as mankind’s public enemy, held two phone calls with Yang Jiechi, China’s top official in charge of foreign affairs.

Some US state governors, including New York State governor Andrew Cuomo, have been in constant touch with Chinese officials over sourcing much-needed medical supplies from China.

According to Hua Chunying, China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, as of April 24, China had shipped to the US nearly 3.5 billion masks, 300 million gloves and 5,800 ventilators. While many of those medical supplies are transactional, some high-profile Chinese tycoons and companies, worried about the toxic tone emerging in bilateral ties, have also stepped up donations of medical supplies to the US. These include Jack Ma and Joe Tsai, founders of the Alibaba Group, the e-commerce giant which owns the South China Morning Post. Chinese Americans and Chinese students studying in the US have also stepped up efforts to source medical supplies from China and elsewhere and ship them to the US.

Another area which receives little press coverage is the constant cooperation between Chinese and American medical professionals and scientists in investigating the origin of the virus, working on vaccines, and sharing the latest information about Covid-19.

As the pandemic has put a brake on globalisation and raised calls for American businesses to move out of China, some business decoupling is inevitable after the world economy reopens and business leaders re-examine priorities and supply chains.

But the big American firms have appeared steadfast in their commitment to China’s vast market.

A recent survey showed that most American companies in China had no plans to leave the country due to the coronavirus. Almost 70 per cent of respondents to the joint survey by the American chambers of commerce in Beijing and Shanghai and PwC said they expected their China supply chain operations to return to normal in less than three months and 96 per cent forecast a return to normal within three to six months, according to Reuters.

Over the past year, the Chinese government has sped up a charm offensive to woo American investors by promising to open up further to American investment and lavish American businessmen with high-level attention to make them feel more welcomed.

Last month, Chinese Vice-Premier Han Zheng in Beijing announced the start of construction on ExxonMobil’s US$10 billion wholly owned petrochemical complex in Huizhou, Guangdong province, in a video link with its chairman and CEO Darren Woods in Dallas.

A smiling Woods hailed the project as reflecting China’s growing commitment to foreign direct investment and innovation. The report featured prominently in China’s prime-time news programme.

This followed high-profile reports in the state media about US coffee chain Starbucks’ announcement in March that it would invest at least US$130 million to build a “coffee innovation park” in Kunshan, Jiangsu province, touted as the company’s largest manufacturing facility outside the US.

Official media highlighted a congratulatory letter fromChinese Premier Li Keqiang, who praised Starbucks on its commitment and promised to widen access to foreign investment.

Even as the international media play up the China-US rivalry from trade and technology to the South China Sea and Taiwan, there are other critical geopolitical issues the countries must work on together for the stability of the region and the world.

The latest case in point is North Korea. The intense speculation about the health and whereabouts of leader Kim Jong-un speaks to the critical need for Beijing and Washington to cooperate to contain any fallout from a leadership crisis in a country sitting on one of the world’s most dangerous power kegs. Failure to do so would have serious ramifications for regional stability.

Coronavirus: why Xi should do a Trump and hand out cash to cooped-up Chinese

Then, there is the China-US trade deal which has been put on the back burner because of the pandemic and which some analysts now speculate could become another casualty of the growing backlash against China.

Now faced with the unprecedented economic turbulence brought on by the pandemic, both the Chinese and American governments should be more incentivised to ensure the hard-fought phase one trade deal works, as it would bring not only economic gains for both sides but political ones too.

For Trump, China’s massive imports of agricultural and other products would both bolster the economy and please his voter base. For Beijing, implementing the trade deal would also bolster the domestic economy, by spurring economic reforms and further opening up the country to foreign investment. ■

Wang Xiangwei is the former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post. He is now based in Beijing as editorial adviser to the paper

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