The US and China stand together at the heights of political anxiety
Two flavors of leadership uncertainty
It was hard to candidly discuss the future of US-China relations with Chinese friends and contacts during the Covid era. Most of them were naturally in China and unable or unwilling to travel abroad; I was unwilling to endure the long hotel-room quarantine and risk further sequestration by traveling to China. Online conversations were stilted, I believe, by the sense that anything said could be easily monitored—not to mention the fact imagining the future during unprecedented times is basically pretty weird.
Since I resumed regular work travel to China last summer and during five trips since then, it has still been hard to imagine US-China futures. The overall trend lines are concerning, even as some potentially stabilizing diplomatic lines have reopened during the Biden administration after the twin lows of the Trump shock and pandemic recriminations. In the context of technology, the future appears especially uncertain after another pair of events: the October 2022 US export controls on semiconductors and chip-making tools, and the November 2022 release of ChatGPT. There was always a mixture of cooperative dynamics (e.g. in basic science and complex supply chains) and adversarial activity (e.g. in cyber operations and military tech), but the balance has been tilting toward the latter.
There’s another factor that has kept me from developing any strong sense of US-China futures, however, and it’s one I have shared with many Chinese interlocutors: The United States and China both have leadership uncertainty. It’s just that the United States knows ours is coming on a Tuesday in November, and China’s will come at some other time.
When I have shared this observation in China, generally outside of the structured “meeting” part of an interaction and during the food/beverage part, I have seen a lot of agreement. In raising the issue I am explicitly expressing my unease about what will become of the United States politically, and there’s no shortage of similar unease in China. Before the pandemic, being a person who sometimes learns by (intentionally or not) pushing at the boundaries of comfortable conversation topics, I often got the sense that talking about Xi Jinping’s un-delimited leadership was taboo—at least with a US researcher. Now, however, the obvious questions about what happens when China’s top leader is one-way-or-another no longer the boss is barely if at all below the surface.
Flying home from Beijing yesterday, two days before a Tuesday in November, I realized that uncertainty and anxiety about short- and long-term political futures is the highest I can remember in both the United States and China. We are both at our political wits’ end, strained by challenges and divides with no clear solutions. So much of the focus among observers of and participants in US-China relations has been on the mounting strain between the two countries. Yet the strain within feels even more important and pressing on both sides.
In December 2020 I wrote:
For several years it has been a truism that there is a new bipartisan U.S. consensus on China, often summarized as an agreement that competition is the dominant feature of bilateral ties. That consensus is real, as far as it goes. But competition is vague, and there is nothing even resembling a consensus on the nature of that competition, let alone on what to do about it.
This is just as true today as it was four years ago, and what happens this week will be immensely consequential for how the US government acts upon this vague consensus. Elections and scheduled leadership transitions mean no one can credibly argue US policy on major issues will be constant long into the future. At minimum, the unknown candidates in one or two cycles could have very different ideas. As Chinese observers often understand better than Washington strategists, US commitments and goals will often be upended on a Tuesday in November.
US and Chinese analysts both have a tendency to imagine that Chinese policy orientations will follow current trendlines forever. While we all know the top leader won’t reign forever, when and how things change are mysteries that may sneak up on us. It’s hard to figure an unknown event at an unknown time into guesses about the future. Still, the consequences for how China acts in the world will be enormous.
Well, the present Tuesday in November has arrived. We’ll see what happens, and I’ll be trying to keep the dual uncertainties in mind regardless.
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.