“Over the last two and a half years,” then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in the December 2011 issue of Foreign Policy, “one of my top priorities has been to identify and expand areas of common interest, to work with China to build mutual trust, and to encourage China’s active efforts in global problem-solving.” Clinton’s essay, a major statement of the Obama Administration’s so-called pivot to Asia, should of course not be read in good faith. It’s vapid in the ways such documents are typically vapid (“our most potent asset as a nation is the power of our values”) and ominous in the ways they are typically ominous (“a more broadly distributed military presence across the region will provide vital advantages”). And still, a text like “America’s Pacific Century” marks an already bygone moment. The China described by Clinton was a rising but not yet threatening power, a challenger who might still be made a (junior) partner. A sense of regal entitlement could be felt even in the article’s headline, with its presumptuous possessive: as if American dominion over the 20th century could be carried into the 21st with only a change of scenery.
The breakdown began, as most consequential deformations of political life tend to do, inside the Republican Party. During his 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney vowed to label China a “currency manipulator” on the first day of his administration. Donald Trump’s innovation, three years later, was to recast China from an economic miracle and wily competitor to a devouring menace. “They want our people to starve,” he told Fox News in August 2015. “They’re taking our business away. They’ve taken our jobs away.” Rival Republican politicians, critical of Obama’s climate negotiations with China, embraced the new belligerence, but none could match Trump’s escalatory jouissance. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” he announced at a rally in May 2016 — conjuring, in a single phrase, both present anxieties of industrial decline and century-old white American paranoia about East Asian sexual predation. By “stealing” our jobs and undercutting our exports, Trump seethed, China had perpetrated “the greatest theft in the history of the world.”
During his first term, Trump seemed only half-heartedly committed to acting on his bluster. If he truly wanted to contain China, why pull the US out of Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations as soon as he entered office? All that slavering talk of trade war yielded nothing but years of grinding negotiations, and Chinese agricultural tariffs that necessitated tens of billions in bailout payments to American farmers. And in a sense, that was just how the president wanted it. For Trump, the China threat bore the same relation to reality as the “murderers” and “drug dealers” said to be pouring in over the Mexican border: a racist phantasm all the more useful for being insuperable.
Trump’s demagoguery nevertheless abetted a real change in geopolitical orientation. As the Quincy Institute scholar Jake Werner wrote recently, “China hawks under Trump [took] advantage of the president’s trade grievances and Covid-era recriminations to pursue an agenda of geopolitical dominance focused on military brinkmanship and a campaign to destroy China’s technologically advanced companies.” If the tools remained crude — the Department of Justice’s so-called China Initiative, meant to combat industrial espionage, snared hundreds of Chinese American researchers in a racial-profiling dragnet between 2018 and 2020, with no measurable effect — the goals had nevertheless been set.
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