Politicians in the EU and USA call for more balanced trade with China. But instead, there is a threat of even more dumping. A new study shows that cheap solar cells and electric cars are just the beginning. In order to support the economy, China’s provinces are building more and more factories, which offload their excess production onto the world market. The result is falling prices and company bankruptcies.
Fans of nuclear technology are in for a treat: The first pebble-bed reactor went into regular operation in China. Germany developed the technology in the 1960s, built a prototype power plant in the late 1980s – and decommissioned it after just two years.
However, China still sees great potential in the technology that Germany has abandoned. This type of nuclear reactor is considered safer because at least a classic core meltdown cannot happen. And in times of energy transition, an industrialized country can use every cleanly produced megawatt hour it can get.
So far, China’s overcapacity has mainly been a problem for the automotive and solar industries. It is now becoming clear that many more sectors will soon be affected – and worldwide. According to a recent study by the think tank Rhodium, there is also massive overcapacity in non-metallic minerals, telecommunications equipment and electrical machinery. Numerous foodstuffs, textiles and chemicals are also produced in abundance and could soon lead to a massive price collapse and sweep numerous manufacturers off the market.
The study points out that Chinese companies have been producing more goods than they can sell on the domestic market for years. They are flooding the rest of the world with their goods, leading to massively falling prices. This puts industrial companies in other countries under pressure, as they cannot keep up with the low prices of Chinese suppliers. Chinese companies have significantly expanded their production capacities, particularly during the pandemic. The government had massively subsidized companies in an attempt to cushion slowing demand.
EU politicians are alarmed: In an interview with China.Table, outgoing Green Party MEP Reinhard Buetikofer warned that China’s industrial overcapacity posed significant challenges for the EU. Last week, Jens Eskelund, President of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, also called on European decision-makers to take action in the trade dispute over Chinese EVs. “Europe cannot just accept that strategically viable industries constituting the European industrial base are being priced out of the market,” Eskelund said at the presentation of the report on China, EU and US industrial policy in the context of geopolitical risks, jointly published by the EU Chamber of Commerce and the consulting firm China Macro Group on March 20. And he emphasized: “Something will need to change.”
However, it remains to be seen what exactly should happen. Last October, the EU Commission already formally launched an investigation into possible unfair subsidies on Chinese EVs. At the start of March, it ordered the registration of all imports of Chinese EVs. This could also result in retroactive punitive tariffs being imposed in the coming months. Currently, less than one in ten electric cars sold in the EU come from China. However, the EU Commission reports that imports have increased by 14 percent since October last year and the trend is still rising.
The reason for industrial overcapacity is multifaceted. In some industries dominated by state-owned companies, the Chinese leadership deliberately promotes counter-cyclical production to create stimuli in times of economic downturn – for example, in steel and cement.
In future-oriented industries such as electromobility, state leaders and provincial governments attempt to encourage private companies to become innovation leaders. Analyst Yanmei Xie, who advises international companies on doing business in China for Gavekal Research, describes the approach as a combination of protectionist compartmentalization and subsequent gradual opening up to international competition.
For example, she says that in the early days of the EV subsidy policy, high industrial subsidies only went to Chinese companies. Following the expiry of some subsidies, the market consolidated and internationally competitive groups like BYD and Geely emerged. According to Yanmei Xie, the industry’s peak phase of subsidization and isolation is over. However, the EU Commission’s investigation could also apply retroactively to past subsidies.
The Rhodium analysis, however, calls China’s overcapacity a “systemic problem” not limited to particular sectors. China has overcapacity because each provincial government has its own state-owned enterprises and subsidizes companies. Many of them do not follow free market rules but are artificially kept alive. China’s automotive sector has almost 150 manufacturers, which is at least 120 too many.
The slow recovery in domestic consumption after the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in increasingly fierce price competition between companies in China and a stronger focus on exports. At the same time, the government continues to largely refrain from economic stimulus measures that would give consumers more purchasing power – a situation that EU Chamber President Eskelund has also criticized.
However, US economist Michael Pettis, Professor of Finance at Peking University, also sees this as a problem for the EU. For Pettis, China’s many years of trade surplus, as well as that of some European countries, most notably Germany, is, above all, an expression of an export-driven economic policy to the detriment of its own population. Pettis believes that the inability of European politicians to find solutions for their weak domestic demand is almost as big a problem for global trade as China’s industrial policy. As the economic models of both the EU and China are geared towards trade surpluses, they are caught in a conflict of interest in the trade dispute, making it difficult to resolve in the long term.
European companies whose export business relies on the Chinese market are at risk of being caught between the fronts in the trade dispute. Yanmei Xie expects China to respond with “carrots, sticks and circumvention tactics” should the EU Commission impose punitive tariffs on EVs. European export goods that could be the first to be affected by retaliatory measures include luxury goods from Italy and France, as well as cars in the premium segment, such as Mercedes-Benz.
Its CEO, Ola Kallenius, recently urged the EU Commission to refrain from imposing new punitive tariffs and even reduce the tariffs on imported Chinese EVs. The import tariffs for Chinese cars into the EU are currently 10 percent, while European manufacturers have to pay an additional 15 percent when exporting to China.
This is why the report by the EU Chamber of Commerce and the China Macro Group does not include a recommendation for punitive tariffs. However, it does include a call for the European Union to promote innovation and competitiveness in strategic industries through its own industrial policy measures. The report also notes that China’s leadership is increasingly seeking to isolate its economy from external trade barriers and reduce its dependence on international supply chains.
On the other hand, the relative dependence of the US and EU on China has increased in recent years in the overall picture of global value chains. Yanmei Xie also sees many European companies in China in a dangerous position. “German car companies are more dependent on the Chinese market than China is on their investments.”
In the years to come, other industries in China could build up overcapacity as a result of supply-side subsidies and thus exert pressure on export markets. These include microchips below the high-end sector and Chinese-manufactured aircraft. The government pursues a similar model of targeted subsidization for the development of civil aviation as it did recently for electromobility. Leonardo Pape
China has taken the lead in the global race for innovative reactor designs. According to Chinese media reports, the world’s first fourth-generation reactor went online in Shidao Bay in the province of Shandong. It is a high-temperature reactor – the same technology that Germany tested in the 1980s and subsequently abandoned.
The new Chinese reactor, designated HTR-PM, utilizes a technology in which 400,000 spheres, each about the size of a tennis ball, are heated with radioactive nuclear fuel. This is why it is also known as a pebble-bed reactor. Their heat is used to create steam, which in turn powers a turbine to generate electricity. The heat is dissipated using helium gas, which makes it safer and more efficient.
In its current design, the Chinese HTR-PM achieves an electrical output of 210 megawatts, which is lower than the typical output of conventional nuclear reactors of 1000 megawatts. A conventional medium-sized coal-fired power plant has an output of around 600 megawatts.
Although the HTR-PM produces less electricity than a conventional nuclear power plant, it offers considerable advantages regarding safety and environmental compatibility. The way the heat is dissipated reduces the risk of severe accidents. This is because helium does not react with its environment and cannot ignite.
The HTR-PM is also more flexible when it comes to choosing a location, as it does not have to be built near large bodies of water. Construction began in 2012. With this project, China has revived and put into practical use a technology that Germany developed in the 1960s and then discarded.
The German reactor was plagued by numerous problems. Among other things, some of the fuel balls in the reactor core had shattered. Furthermore, there were doubts in Germany about the concept’s safety. As long as the helium is inside the reactor, nothing can burn. However, the balls can ignite when exposed to normal air.
In parallel, China pursues another unconventional reactor technology: molten salt reactors. Last summer, the Chinese nuclear regulatory authority granted an operating license for the country’s first thorium salt molten salt reactor (MSR). The plant is located in the city of Wuwei in the Gobi Desert in the province of Gansu and is operated by the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The reactor uses liquid thorium as fuel instead of uranium, making it another of many variants of a fourth-generation reactor.
The United States is also working on a molten salt reactor. TerraPower, a US company founded by Bill Gates, has recently announced plans for a demonstration reactor in Wyoming. The project is part of a government program and aims to prove the technology’s feasibility.
However, it will probably be years before the power plant in Wyoming goes into operation. Bill Gates could have done it quicker. Originally, he and TerraPower had planned to test their advanced reactor technology in China. The plans were canceled due to trade restrictions and the deteriorating relations between the US and China under President Donald Trump.
For over a decade now, China has been working stealthily to alter the territorial and maritime status quo in the Indo-Pacific – an effort that has increasingly stoked tensions with regional neighbors like Australia, India, Japan, Taiwan, and several Southeast Asian countries, as well as the United States. And with US attention and resources focused on conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, China has lately become even more aggressive in its expansionism. Chinese regional hegemony is closer than ever.
Almost daily, China finds a new way to bully Taiwan, which Chinese President Xi Jinping has repeatedly pledged to “reunify” with the mainland (though that objective has no basis in international law or history). As China takes steps like encroaching on Taiwan’s air-defense zone and encircling the island with warships, it raises the risk of a war that would transform global geopolitics.
There are war clouds also gathering over the Himalayas, where a military standoff triggered by China’s repeated furtive encroachments on India’s borderlands has dragged on for nearly four years. And in the East China Sea, China’s intrusions into the territorial waters and airspace of the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands, which China claims as its own, are fueling Japan’s drive toward rearmament.
But the biggest risks of escalation may well lie in the South China Sea, where China’s aggressive efforts to entrench its dominance have regularly led to dangerous near-confrontations, including with US warships and aircraft. For years, China has been working relentlessly to cement its dominance over the South China Sea and exploit that region’s vast resources and strategic position as a critical corridor through which one-third of global shipping passes.
To this end, China has constructed artificial islands atop remote reefs and atolls and transformed them into forward military bases. Though these activities constitute a blatant violation of international law, including a 2016 ruling by an arbitral tribunal at The Hague that invalidated Chinese claims in the South China Sea, there has been little pushback from three successive US administrations. As a result, China has managed to expand its maritime borders unilaterally without firing a single shot.
Now, China’s navy and air force routinely patrol its neighbors’ exclusive economic zones (EEZs), and its coast guard – the world’s largest and most militarized – has conducted “intrusive patrols” of others’ offshore oil and gas fields. Chinese coast-guard vessels, including megaships, wantonly employ “non-lethal” weapons like high-pressure water cannons and long-range acoustic devices.
Moreover, China has been sending its navy and coast guard to shadow, hound, and harass vessels belonging to the US, as well as to smaller neighbors, such as the Philippines and Vietnam, with territorial claims in the area. Even fishing boats have been targeted and destroyed. With Chinese ships now being deliberately designed for “ramming” and “shouldering” other vessels, it seems clear that China will become more aggressive in asserting its territorial claims – and the associated fishing and energy-exploration rights – in the South China Sea.
China’s militarization of the South China Sea poses the greatest threat to the Philippines and Vietnam. But whereas Vietnam pursues an independent foreign policy, which its prime minister calls a historical imperative, the Philippines is a longstanding US ally, with a mutual defense treaty in place since 1951.
And yet, when it comes to China’s expansionism in the South China Sea, the US has largely left the Philippines to fend for itself. In 2012, when China occupied the Scarborough Shoal, a traditional Philippine fishing ground located within the country’s EEZ, US President Barack Obama’s administration stayed silent. Since then, China has steadily eroded the Philippines’ control of other areas within its EEZ, but the US has offered its ally little beyond statements of support.
This is unlikely to change any time soon. With the wars in Ukraine and Gaza stretching American military resources thin, a direct confrontation with China is the last thing the US needs. But refusing to stand up to China may well make a clash more likely – and more destructive.
Already, the US has allowed China to gain such a strong footing in the South China Sea that restoring the status quo of just a decade ago would be all but impossible without a full-scale war. And, as the recent increase in provocations in the South China Sea indicate, Xi is bolder than ever, despite the rising risk of escalation, accidental or otherwise. In the meantime, America’s failure to rein in China’s aggressive expansionism is undermining its own security and trade interests.
US President Joe Biden insists that the US wants “competition with China, not conflict.” But China wants strategic dominance – beginning with the South China Sea – and it is willing to risk conflict to get it. The South China Sea has become a test of American resolve, which Xi is expecting Biden to fail. The world, especially the countries on the front lines of Chinese expansionism, can only hope that Xi is wrong, and that the US finds ways to rein in China without armed conflict.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor Emeritus of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011).
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024.
www.project-syndicate.org
Traditional yet modern – at China Fashion Week, which was held in Beijing over the weekend, designer Xu Jia showed her YYWR collection. Her goal: blurring the line between Asian and Western fashion. Xu was born in Dandong on the border with North Korea. She now lives in Canada.
Politicians in the EU and USA call for more balanced trade with China. But instead, there is a threat of even more dumping. A new study shows that cheap solar cells and electric cars are just the beginning. In order to support the economy, China’s provinces are building more and more factories, which offload their excess production onto the world market. The result is falling prices and company bankruptcies.
Fans of nuclear technology are in for a treat: The first pebble-bed reactor went into regular operation in China. Germany developed the technology in the 1960s, built a prototype power plant in the late 1980s – and decommissioned it after just two years.
However, China still sees great potential in the technology that Germany has abandoned. This type of nuclear reactor is considered safer because at least a classic core meltdown cannot happen. And in times of energy transition, an industrialized country can use every cleanly produced megawatt hour it can get.
So far, China’s overcapacity has mainly been a problem for the automotive and solar industries. It is now becoming clear that many more sectors will soon be affected – and worldwide. According to a recent study by the think tank Rhodium, there is also massive overcapacity in non-metallic minerals, telecommunications equipment and electrical machinery. Numerous foodstuffs, textiles and chemicals are also produced in abundance and could soon lead to a massive price collapse and sweep numerous manufacturers off the market.
The study points out that Chinese companies have been producing more goods than they can sell on the domestic market for years. They are flooding the rest of the world with their goods, leading to massively falling prices. This puts industrial companies in other countries under pressure, as they cannot keep up with the low prices of Chinese suppliers. Chinese companies have significantly expanded their production capacities, particularly during the pandemic. The government had massively subsidized companies in an attempt to cushion slowing demand.
EU politicians are alarmed: In an interview with China.Table, outgoing Green Party MEP Reinhard Buetikofer warned that China’s industrial overcapacity posed significant challenges for the EU. Last week, Jens Eskelund, President of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, also called on European decision-makers to take action in the trade dispute over Chinese EVs. “Europe cannot just accept that strategically viable industries constituting the European industrial base are being priced out of the market,” Eskelund said at the presentation of the report on China, EU and US industrial policy in the context of geopolitical risks, jointly published by the EU Chamber of Commerce and the consulting firm China Macro Group on March 20. And he emphasized: “Something will need to change.”
However, it remains to be seen what exactly should happen. Last October, the EU Commission already formally launched an investigation into possible unfair subsidies on Chinese EVs. At the start of March, it ordered the registration of all imports of Chinese EVs. This could also result in retroactive punitive tariffs being imposed in the coming months. Currently, less than one in ten electric cars sold in the EU come from China. However, the EU Commission reports that imports have increased by 14 percent since October last year and the trend is still rising.
The reason for industrial overcapacity is multifaceted. In some industries dominated by state-owned companies, the Chinese leadership deliberately promotes counter-cyclical production to create stimuli in times of economic downturn – for example, in steel and cement.
In future-oriented industries such as electromobility, state leaders and provincial governments attempt to encourage private companies to become innovation leaders. Analyst Yanmei Xie, who advises international companies on doing business in China for Gavekal Research, describes the approach as a combination of protectionist compartmentalization and subsequent gradual opening up to international competition.
For example, she says that in the early days of the EV subsidy policy, high industrial subsidies only went to Chinese companies. Following the expiry of some subsidies, the market consolidated and internationally competitive groups like BYD and Geely emerged. According to Yanmei Xie, the industry’s peak phase of subsidization and isolation is over. However, the EU Commission’s investigation could also apply retroactively to past subsidies.
The Rhodium analysis, however, calls China’s overcapacity a “systemic problem” not limited to particular sectors. China has overcapacity because each provincial government has its own state-owned enterprises and subsidizes companies. Many of them do not follow free market rules but are artificially kept alive. China’s automotive sector has almost 150 manufacturers, which is at least 120 too many.
The slow recovery in domestic consumption after the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in increasingly fierce price competition between companies in China and a stronger focus on exports. At the same time, the government continues to largely refrain from economic stimulus measures that would give consumers more purchasing power – a situation that EU Chamber President Eskelund has also criticized.
However, US economist Michael Pettis, Professor of Finance at Peking University, also sees this as a problem for the EU. For Pettis, China’s many years of trade surplus, as well as that of some European countries, most notably Germany, is, above all, an expression of an export-driven economic policy to the detriment of its own population. Pettis believes that the inability of European politicians to find solutions for their weak domestic demand is almost as big a problem for global trade as China’s industrial policy. As the economic models of both the EU and China are geared towards trade surpluses, they are caught in a conflict of interest in the trade dispute, making it difficult to resolve in the long term.
European companies whose export business relies on the Chinese market are at risk of being caught between the fronts in the trade dispute. Yanmei Xie expects China to respond with “carrots, sticks and circumvention tactics” should the EU Commission impose punitive tariffs on EVs. European export goods that could be the first to be affected by retaliatory measures include luxury goods from Italy and France, as well as cars in the premium segment, such as Mercedes-Benz.
Its CEO, Ola Kallenius, recently urged the EU Commission to refrain from imposing new punitive tariffs and even reduce the tariffs on imported Chinese EVs. The import tariffs for Chinese cars into the EU are currently 10 percent, while European manufacturers have to pay an additional 15 percent when exporting to China.
This is why the report by the EU Chamber of Commerce and the China Macro Group does not include a recommendation for punitive tariffs. However, it does include a call for the European Union to promote innovation and competitiveness in strategic industries through its own industrial policy measures. The report also notes that China’s leadership is increasingly seeking to isolate its economy from external trade barriers and reduce its dependence on international supply chains.
On the other hand, the relative dependence of the US and EU on China has increased in recent years in the overall picture of global value chains. Yanmei Xie also sees many European companies in China in a dangerous position. “German car companies are more dependent on the Chinese market than China is on their investments.”
In the years to come, other industries in China could build up overcapacity as a result of supply-side subsidies and thus exert pressure on export markets. These include microchips below the high-end sector and Chinese-manufactured aircraft. The government pursues a similar model of targeted subsidization for the development of civil aviation as it did recently for electromobility. Leonardo Pape
China has taken the lead in the global race for innovative reactor designs. According to Chinese media reports, the world’s first fourth-generation reactor went online in Shidao Bay in the province of Shandong. It is a high-temperature reactor – the same technology that Germany tested in the 1980s and subsequently abandoned.
The new Chinese reactor, designated HTR-PM, utilizes a technology in which 400,000 spheres, each about the size of a tennis ball, are heated with radioactive nuclear fuel. This is why it is also known as a pebble-bed reactor. Their heat is used to create steam, which in turn powers a turbine to generate electricity. The heat is dissipated using helium gas, which makes it safer and more efficient.
In its current design, the Chinese HTR-PM achieves an electrical output of 210 megawatts, which is lower than the typical output of conventional nuclear reactors of 1000 megawatts. A conventional medium-sized coal-fired power plant has an output of around 600 megawatts.
Although the HTR-PM produces less electricity than a conventional nuclear power plant, it offers considerable advantages regarding safety and environmental compatibility. The way the heat is dissipated reduces the risk of severe accidents. This is because helium does not react with its environment and cannot ignite.
The HTR-PM is also more flexible when it comes to choosing a location, as it does not have to be built near large bodies of water. Construction began in 2012. With this project, China has revived and put into practical use a technology that Germany developed in the 1960s and then discarded.
The German reactor was plagued by numerous problems. Among other things, some of the fuel balls in the reactor core had shattered. Furthermore, there were doubts in Germany about the concept’s safety. As long as the helium is inside the reactor, nothing can burn. However, the balls can ignite when exposed to normal air.
In parallel, China pursues another unconventional reactor technology: molten salt reactors. Last summer, the Chinese nuclear regulatory authority granted an operating license for the country’s first thorium salt molten salt reactor (MSR). The plant is located in the city of Wuwei in the Gobi Desert in the province of Gansu and is operated by the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The reactor uses liquid thorium as fuel instead of uranium, making it another of many variants of a fourth-generation reactor.
The United States is also working on a molten salt reactor. TerraPower, a US company founded by Bill Gates, has recently announced plans for a demonstration reactor in Wyoming. The project is part of a government program and aims to prove the technology’s feasibility.
However, it will probably be years before the power plant in Wyoming goes into operation. Bill Gates could have done it quicker. Originally, he and TerraPower had planned to test their advanced reactor technology in China. The plans were canceled due to trade restrictions and the deteriorating relations between the US and China under President Donald Trump.
For over a decade now, China has been working stealthily to alter the territorial and maritime status quo in the Indo-Pacific – an effort that has increasingly stoked tensions with regional neighbors like Australia, India, Japan, Taiwan, and several Southeast Asian countries, as well as the United States. And with US attention and resources focused on conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, China has lately become even more aggressive in its expansionism. Chinese regional hegemony is closer than ever.
Almost daily, China finds a new way to bully Taiwan, which Chinese President Xi Jinping has repeatedly pledged to “reunify” with the mainland (though that objective has no basis in international law or history). As China takes steps like encroaching on Taiwan’s air-defense zone and encircling the island with warships, it raises the risk of a war that would transform global geopolitics.
There are war clouds also gathering over the Himalayas, where a military standoff triggered by China’s repeated furtive encroachments on India’s borderlands has dragged on for nearly four years. And in the East China Sea, China’s intrusions into the territorial waters and airspace of the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands, which China claims as its own, are fueling Japan’s drive toward rearmament.
But the biggest risks of escalation may well lie in the South China Sea, where China’s aggressive efforts to entrench its dominance have regularly led to dangerous near-confrontations, including with US warships and aircraft. For years, China has been working relentlessly to cement its dominance over the South China Sea and exploit that region’s vast resources and strategic position as a critical corridor through which one-third of global shipping passes.
To this end, China has constructed artificial islands atop remote reefs and atolls and transformed them into forward military bases. Though these activities constitute a blatant violation of international law, including a 2016 ruling by an arbitral tribunal at The Hague that invalidated Chinese claims in the South China Sea, there has been little pushback from three successive US administrations. As a result, China has managed to expand its maritime borders unilaterally without firing a single shot.
Now, China’s navy and air force routinely patrol its neighbors’ exclusive economic zones (EEZs), and its coast guard – the world’s largest and most militarized – has conducted “intrusive patrols” of others’ offshore oil and gas fields. Chinese coast-guard vessels, including megaships, wantonly employ “non-lethal” weapons like high-pressure water cannons and long-range acoustic devices.
Moreover, China has been sending its navy and coast guard to shadow, hound, and harass vessels belonging to the US, as well as to smaller neighbors, such as the Philippines and Vietnam, with territorial claims in the area. Even fishing boats have been targeted and destroyed. With Chinese ships now being deliberately designed for “ramming” and “shouldering” other vessels, it seems clear that China will become more aggressive in asserting its territorial claims – and the associated fishing and energy-exploration rights – in the South China Sea.
China’s militarization of the South China Sea poses the greatest threat to the Philippines and Vietnam. But whereas Vietnam pursues an independent foreign policy, which its prime minister calls a historical imperative, the Philippines is a longstanding US ally, with a mutual defense treaty in place since 1951.
And yet, when it comes to China’s expansionism in the South China Sea, the US has largely left the Philippines to fend for itself. In 2012, when China occupied the Scarborough Shoal, a traditional Philippine fishing ground located within the country’s EEZ, US President Barack Obama’s administration stayed silent. Since then, China has steadily eroded the Philippines’ control of other areas within its EEZ, but the US has offered its ally little beyond statements of support.
This is unlikely to change any time soon. With the wars in Ukraine and Gaza stretching American military resources thin, a direct confrontation with China is the last thing the US needs. But refusing to stand up to China may well make a clash more likely – and more destructive.
Already, the US has allowed China to gain such a strong footing in the South China Sea that restoring the status quo of just a decade ago would be all but impossible without a full-scale war. And, as the recent increase in provocations in the South China Sea indicate, Xi is bolder than ever, despite the rising risk of escalation, accidental or otherwise. In the meantime, America’s failure to rein in China’s aggressive expansionism is undermining its own security and trade interests.
US President Joe Biden insists that the US wants “competition with China, not conflict.” But China wants strategic dominance – beginning with the South China Sea – and it is willing to risk conflict to get it. The South China Sea has become a test of American resolve, which Xi is expecting Biden to fail. The world, especially the countries on the front lines of Chinese expansionism, can only hope that Xi is wrong, and that the US finds ways to rein in China without armed conflict.
Brahma Chellaney, Professor Emeritus of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011).
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024.
www.project-syndicate.org
Traditional yet modern – at China Fashion Week, which was held in Beijing over the weekend, designer Xu Jia showed her YYWR collection. Her goal: blurring the line between Asian and Western fashion. Xu was born in Dandong on the border with North Korea. She now lives in Canada.
