I usually do not like predictions, but I have some thoughts. Actually, I have a lot of thoughts, but these are some of the ones within my area of professional competency. I will probably be wrong about some of this, and feel free to let me know if you think so. (In another era, these might have been tweets; today, they are a blog post.)
I. Climate catastrophe is still coming for us all. The United States now is likely to be even more of a spoiler of global mitigation and adaptation efforts. When climate factors add stressors to international security, markets, and populations, it is even less likely the United States and China will constructively cooperate. The world will have to try to navigate around the United States, but that might not work very well. Some recent policy improvements will be sticky, but we needed much more.
II. The specifics of US policy toward China will be very hard to predict, but in sum it will be disruptive. Deal-making and capricious targeting of punitive measures is likely. (TikTok could be spared, or not.) Overall, however, the era of selective “de-risking” is likely over and a trend toward more thorough “decoupling” is likely—even if its extent may be limited by economic realities.
III. US economic measures toward China will likely be even more disruptive than the existing tariffs, and China’s government will retaliate. How it does so is not predetermined. Will it help or hurt a company’s fortunes if its CEO is buddies with the US president? Overall, US businesses will wish to further mitigate their exposure by decreasing reliance on Chinese supply chains and markets. Trade negotiations may advance in parallel, but I wouldn’t hope for much: “Phase one” was both a joke and never worked out.
IV. The US government is likely to find it harder to bring allies and partners along on costly measures toward China. Already pushed beyond their comfort zone, how much appetite will the Netherlands and Japan have to undermine China’s chip industry “for democracy” if it’s an aspiring autocrat cajoling them? Any number of proposals in the name of democracy will be treated with deserved skepticism; democratic publics will demand this of their governments. But geopolitical bloc logic may still prevail.
V. The China Initiative, or something like it, will return and may be even more careless and damaging to innocent people. Anti-AAPI hate and violence may rise again. I hope I’m wrong.
VI. US human rights narratives about China, though often righteous on their face, will suffer even more from the perception and reality of hypocrisy. It has already been rich to hear about the rules-based order from a government unceasingly providing weapons used to kill tens of thousands of civilians. How about the religious freedom pitch from the folks who brought us the Muslim ban, or gender equality from the people denying medical care to women?
VII. Current trends in cyber operations attributed to China point to serious escalatory potential. Pre-positioning in critical infrastructure, exploiting telephone wiretap systems to target the campaigns before a presidential election, and no known bilateral mechanism for strategic stability in this area—this is volatile stuff in addition to the other present uncertainties.
VIII. US-China dialogue, official and unofficial, will be diminished compared with the hypothetical alternative future. We may still keep some momentum, and it’s hard to sink below the Covid nadir, but it will be more stressful and logistically challenging to get US and Chinese groups together to discuss problem solving or common interests.
IX. Fewer US citizens will develop up-to-date and grounded knowledge about China. Business travel, study abroad, academic fieldwork, etc., will seem more risky and less career-boosting due to a combination of repression and suspicion in China and questions about loyalties in the United States. Though still coming in large numbers, even more Chinese will think twice before studying in the United States. More US decisions about China will be made based on narratives, politics, and desk research.
X. In the United States we will hear—constantly—that problems are China’s fault, or immigrants’ fault… anyone but ours. But in most cases they will be problems created by a combination of macro realities (tech, climate, economic) and bad choices or a dysfunctional political system (industry capture, money in politics, bad information sources). Think economic inequities, job losses, housing costs, a strained care economy. Politicians in hurricane country were blaming the actual weather on Democrats.
That’s all for now. What to do about it will have to come another day. I’d love to hear your ideas.
About Here It Comes
Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.