The event coincided with trade talks in Washington this week between Chinese and US officials. Chinese Vice-Premier Liu He, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer will meet on Thursday to try to beat a March 1 deadline for the US to impose more tariffs on Chinese imports.
The Hudson Institute was also the venue for US Vice-President Mike Pence speech in October in which he called for a tougher approach towards Beijing as the confrontation between China and the US spilled from trade to security and ideology, fuelling fears of a new “cold war”.
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The rivalry between the world’s two largest economies has long been anticipated, according to Pillsbury, who said Trump predicted in 2000 that China would be the greatest challenge for the US.
But Pillsbury also said that in more than 50 speeches from Trump mentioning a free and open Indo-Pacific, the businessman-turned-president never “demonised” China or named it an enemy or adversary. He preferred the word “competition”.
There have been about 30 phone calls between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping and some of those lasted an hour. That was “not two enemies talking to each other”, Pillsbury said.
“The notion now, the solution to trade disputes could probably come in a face-to-face conversation of some kind,” he said. “The potential for cooperation with China remains.”
In addition to the tariffs war, China and the US are at odds over development of Chinese technology. On the weekend, Pence claimed Chinese telecom giant Huawei posed a security threat – a statement rebuked by Chinese State Councillor and senior diplomat Yang Jiechi.
Then there is the South China Sea, to which China and a number of other countries lay claim. Beijing has protested against the presence of US warships in contested waters, movements that have become more common over the past two years as Washington revitalised its Indo-Pacific strategy in December 2017 to counter the growing geopolitical influence of China.
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Patrick Cronin, a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute, said China was rewriting the rules “very swiftly ”, mainly through the Code of Conduct in the South China Sea under negotiation with Asean neighbours.
The parties agreed to establish a non-binding code during a 2002 summit Phnom Penh, Cambodia, after more than a decade of tensions over territorial claim and counterclaim on the resource-rich waters.
A more formal framework for the code was settled in 2017 with the aim of completing talks by 2020, although the details have never been made public.
“It is clear that India, Japan and the US can do much about this here toward a common approach, toward international law that does not allow China to create exclusive regional rules,” Cronin said.
In October, the US Congress passed the Better Utilisation of Investments Leading to Development Act of 2018, known as the Build Act.
This sought to double the investment cap for the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, an intergovernmental agency to channel US private capital and influence towards overseas projects – a US$60 billion counter to China’s “Belt and Road Initiative”.
Pillsbury said the US Indo-Pacific strategy was not a cold war-style containment plan for China, but he said Beijing warned that the strategy “could move in that direction”.
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One of the areas yet to be tested was the balance of military power, and possible conflict scenarios such as Chinese military action against self-governing Taiwan had to be assessed.
He also said Chinese hawks were particularly sensitive to US arms sales to India as they saw it as evidence of an alliance between the US and India.
“If we, in fact, do nothing more than what’s already been done, and Chinese hawks perceive that as a reason to strengthen their armed forces and prepare themselves for a new cold war, that to me would be a nightmare,” Pillsbury said.
“It will be not the intention of the authors of the Indo-Pacific strategy to use hollow, almost meaningless in a strategic sense, rhetoric to provoke China into much stronger, assertive reaction we’ve ever expected,” he said. “Be careful of what you wish for.
“So, my own view is that the president balances these ideas. He is smarter than me, and he sees choices that lie ahead with China. But do not forget the point, unpredictability is the best way to out-negotiate the Chinese.”
“So, how do you be unpredictable? Certainly, vagueness and ambiguity will be in there,” he said.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Trump strategy is to keep China on edge, adviser says
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