Acho que os chineses não têm essa intenção: eles apenas intentam levar uma guerra fria econômica, que aliás eles já ganharam.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
It’s not all on Trump: China favors confrontation with the U.S.
As the United States and China limp to a truce in the trade war, two very different story lines have played out on opposite sides of the Pacific. In the United States, a series of high-profile American figures — a columnist, a former treasury secretary, a former World Bank president and an expert on foreign relations — have weighed in with laments about the course of America’s ties to China and have criticized the Trump administration for its handling of Beijing.
If current American policies continue, these men warn, China and the United States will descend into a new Cold War that could be more dangerous and far more costly than the old one. All of these writers call for a return to the policies of engagement with China, which have been pursued since 1972, when President Richard M. Nixon first journeyed to Beijing.
In China, however, no such parallel concern has been expressed publicly. There has been no criticism of Xi Jinping for running his country’s relations with the United States into a ditch. Instead, since Nov. 20, there has been a striking upsurge in condemnation of the United States on a level not seen since 1999, when a U.S. missile mistakenly destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia, killing three Chinese reporters.
For the past several weeks, the main state-run nightly news program, watched by hundreds of millions, has been devoted to disparaging Americans and their government. The United States has been blamed for fomenting the six-month-long demonstrations in Hong Kong and for meddling in China’s internal affairs over criticism of the treatment of the Uighurs.
Carl Minzner, an expert on U.S.-China relations at Fordham University, has watched the newscast every day since Nov. 20 and notes that each night the United States has been attacked not once or twice but in multiple news segments — 13 on Dec. 4 alone, followed by eight the next night. Then on Dec. 13, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, blasted the United States for “almost paranoid” behavior that has seriously damaged “the hard-won foundation of mutual trust between China and the United States.”
Given these jeremiads, reading the pronouncements by the American figures —columnist Thomas Friedman, former treasury secretary Henry Paulson, former World Bank president Robert Zoellick and foreign affairs expert Fareed Zakaria — it’s difficult to grasp what exactly they would have the United States do. It takes two to fight a Cold War; it also takes two to stop one.
So far, China doesn’t seem ready to put down its gloves.
To be sure, some of the criticisms of the Trump administration by these four writers are spot on. To properly deal with China, the Trump administration can’t continue to alienate America’s allies, including South Korea, Japan and Europe. Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership also denied America an important lever to push back against China’s trade practices. But embracing these smarter policies won’t actually improve relations with China or head off a new Cold War, unless China is also ready to compromise. And so far, there’s no evidence of that.
For me, the critical issue is that none of these writers seems to have truly grasped how much China has changed for the worse under Xi, despite the easy availability of insightful books on the subject, such as Elizabeth Economy’s “The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State." China began to veer from its market-oriented economic reforms and understated foreign policy in 2008, when the global financial crisis made the United States appear weak. Xi’s rise to Communist Party boss in 2012 added a dose of accelerant.
These experts also soft-pedal another issue that is key to understanding the negative trajectory in U.S.-China relations: decoupling. “Decoupling” is a buzzword used to describe the process by which the United States and China have begun to separate their intensively intertwined economies. All of the authors decry decoupling as a strategic error, but they also assume that if the Trump administration decides to forego decoupling, then China will follow suit.
This ignores China’s role in the issue.
China effectively announced its intention to decouple from its dependence on U.S. technology in 2015 — well before Trump’s election. That was the year when Beijing rolled out its Made in China 2025 program, which aims to replace foreign-made high technology with Chinese products.
China has also “decoupled” from international agreements. It has ignored a major treaty, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, by claiming all of the South China Sea as its territory and ignored the verdict of an international tribunal that ruled against China’s claim. It has also declared invalid the Sino-British Joint Declaration, an international understanding made over the future of Hong Kong. And since 2014, when a newspaper in Liaoning province published an article urging students to expose liberal professors, it has intellectually decoupled from the West in a campaign that has led to book burning.
This is a far different country than the China that entered the World Trade Organization in 2001.
In a way, many experts have become unconscious victims of the Chinese Communist system of thought control — where the victim is always at fault. Under this logic, responsibility for the current state of affairs has to be lain at the feet of the United States because the Communist Party never makes a mistake. Our four American commentators seem to have internalized that message. So, they declare, the United States needs to do more. China? Not so much.
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