Strategic drift: Chips to security, China gets its way

In its rivalry with the United States, China has racked up a series of wins in recent weeks.

The Trump administration has softened its criticism of China’s Communist Party in a strategy document. It has reopened a channel for high-end chip sales that Washington once treated as untouchable. And President Donald Trump has held his tongue as a key US ally in Asia faces Chinese intimidation for backing Taiwan.

For Beijing, the shifts in Washington’s approach suggest that Trump has less of an appetite for confronting China over ideology, technology and diplomacy. Some commentators in China have hailed these developments as irrefutable signs of American decline and Chinese ascendancy.

Trump’s decision to allow some advanced chips to be sold to China, the Chinese technology executive Zhou Hongyi said on social media, showed how China’s unstoppable technological rise had “pushed the United States against a wall.”

The Global Times, a Communist Party newspaper, pointed to the White House’s new national security strategy, which focuses more on the Western Hemisphere than China, as “evidence of the US acknowledging its relative decline in power.” Washington has realized “it cannot afford the costs of prolonged confrontation” with China, the nationalist blog Jiuwanli concluded.

And Trump has remained publicly silent as China has mounted a pressure campaign against Japan, a US ally, over that country’s support for Taiwan. Beijing has summoned Japanese diplomats, canceled flights, curbed tourism and stepped up military flights near Japanese airspace, including with Russia, to highlight its displeasure.

This is Trump’s more transactional diplomacy in action, according to Chinese analysts. In this less hawkish, more pragmatic approach, China is seen not as a threat to U.S. supremacy that must be contained, but as a major nation to be negotiated with.

That shift was laid out plainly in Trump’s national security strategy, released last week. It recast the US-China rivalry as chiefly an economic contest and not a struggle over security or political systems. The strategy’s priority: establishing a “mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing.”

And unlike previous presidents, Trump showed no interest in the longstanding American project of promoting democracy in China. For the first time in more than 30 years, the strategy did not criticize China’s authoritarian rule or press Beijing to uphold human rights — sentiments echoed by presidents from George HW Bush to Joe Biden and even by Trump in his first term.

The strategy showed that “China’s push to make the international system friendlier to autocracy is no longer on our list of priorities,” said Caroline Costello of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. Xin Qiang, a US-China expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, said the strategy showed that the Trump administration had realized “trying to change China by playing the ideological card is neither possible nor feasible.” Since Trump’s second term, he added, the policy has been “profit-driven,” and good for China.

Trump’s transactional bent may help explain why his administration reversed export controls on critical artificial intelligence technology that could aid China economically and militarily. It granted Nvidia permission to begin selling its second-most-powerful semiconductor to China. The US government would receive 25% of all revenues from the sales, Trump said — a trade critics called short-term economic gain over long-term security.

The latest moves extend the conciliatory posture Trump struck at his summit with Xi Jinping in October. That meeting resulted in the US walking back tariffs after China flexed leverage by withholding rare earth exports and soybean purchases. The two leaders spoke again last month, after which Trump said he had accepted an invitation to visit Beijing in April.

David Sacks, a fellow in Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Trump was likely thinking about that Beijing meeting when the White House released its strategy. “He likely wants maximum negotiating space, and pointed language on China he might view as constraining that space.”

For Beijing, the shift from containment to competition amounts to a strategic victory. It validates China’s argument that countries should not interfere in the affairs of other states, and that there are no universal human rights that must be protected.

Chinese analysts say Trump’s pragmatic approach should herald a more stable chapter in relations. China’s Foreign Ministry said Beijing also wanted “mutually beneficial economic relations” and hoped the US would help “shrink the list of issues” between the two countries.

The New York Times