Thammasat University students interested in China, political science, economics, sociology, cultural politics, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 2 November webinar on Is the US Competing Effectively with China in Asia?
The event, on Thursday, 2 November at 8am Bangkok time, is presented by the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore.
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of the rivalry between the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America.
Students are invited to register at this link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/6516974285716/WN_QfaVHBhXROKyTklC6MFoyQ#/
The event webpage explains:
About the Webinar
In 2021, newly elected US President Joe Biden declared: “We are in a competition with China to win the 21st century”, signifying Washington’s resolve to “invest, align and compete” to prevail over a strategic peer competitor. The stated objective “is not to change the PRC but to shape the strategic environment in which it operates, building a balance of influence in the world that is maximally favorable to the United States, our allies and partners, and the interests and values we share”. But competing with China has since become central to the Biden administration’s Asia strategy—and the administration is deploying tools that, in some areas, actively seek to attenuate China’s industrial and technological advance. Three years into the Biden administration, what progress has Washington made in its strategy? Is it winning over Asian friends and allies in the contest with Beijing and where does it still fall short? This webinar sheds light on the challenges faced by the US in its competition with China in the region, particularly Southeast Asia. In doing so, the speaker will also address the complexity of the China challenge to the US, especially Beijing’s ability to leverage its favorable strategic and economic position in its own region to make itself a central player in the future of Asia.
About the Speaker
Evan A. Feigenbaum is Vice President for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he oversees research in Washington, Beijing, and New Delhi on a dynamic region encompassing both East Asia and South Asia. […]
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) is a nonpartisan international affairs think tank headquartered in Washington D.C., with operations in Europe, South and East Asia, and the Middle East as well as the United States. Founded in 1910 by Andrew Carnegie, the organization describes itself as being dedicated to advancing cooperation between countries, reducing global conflict, and promoting active international engagement between the United States and countries around the world. It engages leaders from multiple sectors and across the political spectrum.
In the University of Pennsylvania’s “2019 Global Go To Think Tanks Report”, Carnegie was ranked the number 1 top think tank in the world.
Three years ago on the CEIP website, Dr. Feigenbaum posted an article, Why the United States and China Forgot How to Cooperate:
[…] The strategic competition between the United States and China is deep, abiding, and intensifying. In many areas, especially those related to the security future of the Indo-Pacific region, it is now crystal clear that U.S. and Chinese interests will clash—and clash often.
But these U.S.-China tensions raise tough questions for the rest of the world—not just about what China and the United States are doing but, perhaps more importantly, about what they are not doing. Neither Washington nor Beijing is helping to organize and lead a collective global response to the new coronavirus, the most acute health and economic crisis since World War II. They are not mobilizing the Group of 20, nor international institutions, nor multinational health and financial instruments. And that leaves too many other countries to fend for themselves against the dreadful predations of the virus.
So, U.S.-China strategic competition is giving way to a kind of “managed enmity” that is disrupting the world and forestalling the prospect of transnational responses to transnational threats.
But strategic competition between the United States and China is not, in itself, new at all. It is a feature, not a bug, of the U.S.-China relationship. So, the fact that prior episodes of coordination are not being replicated today is the result of several new dynamics:
The personalities, pugnacious inclinations, and domestic political imperatives of the two leaders who currently manage both countries, Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump.
The way that both bureaucracies have come to view nearly every challenge through the lens of their security competition.
Early actions in China during this pandemic to muzzle whistleblowers and suppress the dissemination of virus-related information.
U.S. rhetoric about the pandemic, most notably from Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who argued on television that the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China, offered an “opportunity” for the United States to capitalize economically on China’s predicament.
Beijing’s outrageous propaganda campaign to try shifting the blame onto foreigners, including the United States and Italy.
An escalating war of words between Chinese and U.S. officials over responsibility and culpability.
The tendency in both Beijing and Washington to forget their own productive history of past coordination, and its benefits to their citizens.
The net result of all this is that security competition is bleeding back into every area of U.S.-China interaction, from economic exchange to scientific research, and even infectious disease prevention, mitigation, and vaccine development.
And yet the fact is, over the last twenty years, these two countries did coordinate, act in complementary ways, and help lead global responses to global threats—coordination happened despite their strategic tension.
But now the two countries that have led the globalization of the world economy for the past twenty-five years are failing—utterly—to foster collective action during the global health crisis set off by the coronavirus. Instead, they are racing to the bottom, with both governments refracting the outbreak through the prism of their geopolitical competition while hurling insults about each other’s competence and intent.
What has happened?
For one thing, the United States and China have always had ideological, political, and security tensions. But once they began to exchange goods, capital, people, and technology on a large scale in the 1990s, each country shelved at least some of its political and security concerns about the other. In effect, they consented to let forces of economic integration work their will.
As a result, many people came to presume that economic integration would mitigate security competition. But that has not happened. In fact, if anything, military tensions and competitive security dynamics are actually intensifying—from the South China Sea to the Taiwan Strait.
What is more, now those security dynamics are bleeding back into trade, investment, educational exchanges, scientific research, and nearly everything that the United States and China either do, or could do, together.
That means the things that were supposed to integrate the two countries are actually dividing, not uniting, them. And this dynamic has become worse in recent years, intensifying, in particular, in the years since Xi Jinping came to power in China in 2012. Chinese foreign policies have become more pugnacious and assertive, Chinese domestic policies more statist, and China itself considerably less open than in the prior decade.
But amid all that, the central lesson of past crisis coordination between Washington and Beijing is that coordination can and should be possible even when the two countries do not get along. Sadly, however, both China and the United States have forgotten a good deal of that shared history […]
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)