In the last several decades, China has grown to be a world superpower in every sense of the word, from being the industrial workhorse of the world, wielding immense political power to sway international events, to developing an increasingly sophisticated and advanced military force comparable to that of the most powerful nations in the world. However, in the backdrop of such a meteoric rise in such a short span following the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after the centuries of humiliation and subjugation under foreign powers, China has been a common target of international criticism for a variety of "bad behaviors". One prominent point that the public and press often cite is the Chinese human rights violation, to include most recently, its treatment of a minority ethnic and religious group Uyghurs. However, ever since its inception, China has maintained a ideological zealotry to sovereignty that seemingly renders them immune to international pressure, and certainly their rise in prominence in the international stage has only further cemented their behaviors.
An oft asked question is, why does the international community let China continue its oppression of ethnic minorities like the Uyghurs? More specifically, I read a social media post recently that prompted this piece, which asserted that the whole world should join arms in applying overwhelming and whatever pressure possible to force Chinese submission. While my immediate and visceral reaction was to brush it off as exceedingly naive and uninformed on international affairs, I figured that it was a good opportunity to explore the various tools in the diplomatic kit that the U.S. and other countries have and how effective they have been in achieving their goals. To that end, I will explore what sort of challenges exist in pressuring China, and what the U.S. and the international community have already tried against China in recent years and what their outcomes were.
Tools of the Trade
First, I want to explore the very notion of effecting change in another country. Generally, countries will attempt to influence each other using economics, diplomacy, and/or military with either positive or negative incentives. To give a concrete example, let us explore the following scenario. The U.S. in coalition with international partners imposes broad economic sanctions on China in order to change their behavior in regards to their poor treatment of ethnic and religious minorities in China. To simplify this scenario, the U.S. would be engaging in diplomacy with partners to create a sanctions regime that imposes a negative economic incentive on China. That is to say, if China does not change their behavior, they will suffer economically. However, whether China decides to submit to international pressure or not will depend on several different factors and ultimately, China has to come to the conclusion that continuing their behavior is not worth the negative economic impact from the sanctions.
The concept behind the above example is relatively simple, but effective implementation of such measures is far more difficult, and doubly so in actually achieving your intended outcome. Let us go through the hypothetical scenario step by step and see where we encounter challenges that makes this not such a simple endeavor.
While the U.S. can impose unilateral sanctions against China, this is unlikely to be sufficiently painful enough for China to induce any change. While the U.S. and China are admittedly large trading partners, the relationship is such that the U.S. is proportionately a net exporter of Chinese goods. If the trade between the two countries were to come at a screeching halt, while it is plausible that given sufficient time, other countries could replace China, it would take a gargantuan undertaking of building industrial capacity on a level that no other country is currently capable of for such a wide variety of goods. However, China has the convenience of simply shifting its export of goods to any other trade partner in the world. While China would also suffer from logistical challenges as it establishes new destinations for its goods, comparatively speaking, it would be less costly for China.
Therefore, in order to have maximum impact, the U.S. would need the cooperation of international partners to impose economic sanctions on China. However, the typical mechanism for international sanctions through the UN would not be available given that China is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, giving it absolute veto powers. The U.S. then would have to engage in a complicated dance of diplomacy through multiple countries to get their cooperation in sanctioning China. And many of these countries like the U.S. are heavily dependent on China for trade, making any sanctions costly for them and likely politically inconvenient for them domestically.
Let us suppose that such a coalition of international partners were amassed to impose significant economic sanctions against China. While it is difficult to speculate in such a hypothetical scenario, we must consider that ideologically, China has maintained strict adherence to preserving its sovereignty and not bending to foreign intervention. As was the case during the Cold War when western powers sought to prevent the spread of communism, even during the heights of mass famine of "The Great Leap", China sought it in its best interest to actively fight against western economic and military pressure, to the point of engaging in direct combat with UN forces in the Korean War, and indirectly confronting U.S. forces in Vietnam. Considering that the poor treatment of Uyghurs are part of China's greater cultural project of homogenization to solidify the CCP's control over the country against dissidents or factional elements, it would take a great amount of pain for China to reverse course. For China, absolute control over the populace is a matter of survival of the ruling regime, and not simply a sadistic fancy of some spoiled princeling.
Past Efforts
History has much to tell us on U.S. efforts in trying to change China's behavior on the international stage. In short order, I will explore three separate examples, each covering economy, diplomacy, and military.
Fortunately, we have a convenient example of the recent Trump administration's "trade war" against China, which is ironically a unilateral juxtaposition of the multilateral effort of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement from the Obama administration. Without going into the convoluted details of the justification behind the "trade war", we will simply explore its mechanics and whether a positive outcome was gained. The ultimate goal of the U.S. was to change China's behavior in what was considered unfair trade practices. The leverage that the administration chose to effect a change was unilateral trade tariffs against Chinese goods entering the U.S. with the first measures taking effect in 2018 and additional measures being added until the Biden administration took power in early 2021. Ultimately, while there were several working level negotiations that occurred between the U.S. and China, 2 years of intensely escalating tariffs did not yield in any long term behavioral change in China's trade policy. Instead, many economists estimate that the cost of the tariffs negatively impacted global growth by several percentage points and only served to sour U.S. relations with other countries with whom it tried to compel cooperation.
Since their first nuclear testings in the early 90s, the U.S. along with the international community has enforced strict sanctions regimes against North Korea. However, its two neighbors China and Russia has always proved to be a challenge in pressuring the North Koreans as they continue to trade and allow workers in flagrant violation of UN sanctions. While the U.S. has continuously sought to liaise cooperation from the Chinese through diplomatic channels and through threats of secondary sanctions enforcement, it has had little effect in changing China's willingness to supply North Korea with the precious foreign currency it needs to continue to survive under the sanctions and to continue developing its nuclear capabilities. For China, their decision to circumvent the UN sanctions which they agreed upon as a permanent member on the UN security council has faced diplomatic consequences in the form of deteriorated relations with the U.S. and other likeminded partners, and economic consequences in the form of secondary economic sanctions from the U.S. designating Chinese entities and preventing their use of U.S.-based financial services and institutions. It seems likely to conclude that to the Chinese, these costs are insufficient to the value that North Korea has as a strategic buffer zone to U.S. military forces on South Korea and Japan, making such consequences trivial to what they would lose in return if they were to submit to U.S. demands.
During the height of the Cold War in the 60s, the U.S. was attempting to thwart further spread of communism to the greater Asia region to include Vietnam. In part to dissuade Chinese involvement in Vietnam, the U.S. decided to deploy thousands of military throughout the early 60s, which was increasingly met by Chinese military assistance to North Vietnam. From memoirs of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, we get a glimpse of the Kennedy administration's calculus in increasing pressure in Asia in the hopes that, a weakened China suffering from mass starvation from the Great Leap Forward, would feel under prepared to exert its power abroad. Consequently, what was intended to be an incremental buildup of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam to dissuade and counter Chinese forces, it inversely only served to ratchet up the affair on both ends. In simple terms, the U.S. sought to effect change in China's behavior in spreading communist ideology to the region through military pressure, which culminated in a indirect confrontation between the two which the U.S. eventually withdrew from.
Conclusion
China is a very resilient country. It has weathered the fall of the communist bloc, periods of terrible mismanagement which costed millions of lives, and more recently, it has weathered numerous worldwide financial crises, and even a global pandemic. Yet despite such all that, China seems to be stronger than ever before, and emboldened to project its economic, political, and military might abroad. The threat to its immediate neighbors are a given, but we see China expand its influence to the rest of the world, including entangling Africa under considerable amount of debt, and embedding students, scholars, and skilled workers into the western world. Is it an inevitable conclusion that China overtakes the U.S. as the dominant power in all realms of the international space? Certainly, the traditional methods by which the U.S. has been able to exert its influence to effect desirable outcomes in foreign countries seem wholly ineffective on China, and they appear more than willing to turn the same tools back around against U.S. interests with great success. For years, people have debated on a strategic and graceful U.S. "abdication" of world hegemony to a "burden sharing" policy with China as a means of incorporating China into the international systems that were previously led by the U.S. in the hopes that they become a "responsible" superpower. But there is always the fear that an authoritarian system like China is susceptible to abusing their powers to the detriment of the world. As for me, I don't quite know what the right answer is, but it does appear to me that the methods that the U.S. has employed in the past century simply do not work when it comes to China and there needs to be a paradigm shift in how we approach this problem. And that does not include "simply" sanctioning China until they submit as some people might say.
