Barack Obama and Xi Jinping casually strolled around the exclusive Sunnylands retreat near Palm Springs, California, smiling to display warm and friendly U.S.-China relations. It was the summer of 2013, and things seemed to be going well between the reigning superpower and the ascendant one.
Obama was a fairly seasoned second-term president; Xi, the new Chinese leader, had just taken the reins from Hu Jintao, and nearly everyone in Washington viewed him as the embodiment of a new, more hopeful chapter in U.S.-China relations. Obama spoke of a “new model of cooperation” with China and said the United States welcomed the “continuing peaceful rise of China as a world power.” It was the beginning of a new era in U.S.-China relations.
Except it wasn’t.
A decade later, all the goodwill that Obama and Xi seemed to have built at Sunnylands has completely evaporated. At home, Xi has cemented his authoritarian power over the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He has carried out a sweeping crackdown on ethnic Uyghurs and other minorities in China’s Xinjiang region in what the United States considers a genocide and has overseen the country’s most ambitious military buildup since World War II. In Washington, the so-called doves who long championed engagement with China have been completely sidelined. Policymakers and lawmakers across the increasingly wide political spectrum have coalesced into a consensus: It’s time to get tough on China—whatever that means in practice.
Washington has ramped up military support for Taiwan, the independently governed island that Beijing views as its own territory. A top U.S. military commander recently issued a memo warning his troops that they could be fighting China over Taiwan by 2025. A high-profile trip to Beijing by U.S. President Joe Biden’s top diplomat, meant to dial down tensions between the two powers, was scuppered in early February after an alleged Chinese spy balloon floated across the continental United States, sparking a minor political firestorm in Washington.
“My fear is that by acting like military conflict with China is inevitable, you will ultimately make that reality come true,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democratic lawmaker on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “China has not made the decision to invade Taiwan, but if the United States turns all of China policy into Taiwan policy, then that will potentially affect their decision-making.”
Did decades of U.S. efforts at engagement, which started with President Richard Nixon opening relations with China and lasted through Obama’s presidency, simply fail to deliver? Or did the arrival of Xi and his aggressive, revisionist approach to China’s place in the world render it moot?
Many Western lawmakers, policymakers, and China analysts place the blame of spoiled relations solely at Xi’s feet.
“I’m afraid engagement is deader than a doornail,” said Orville Schell, the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. “I think that was one of the great tragedies of Xi Jinping’s reign … that he, in effect, destroyed it, made it unviable.”
Still, the hatching of the hawks happened in the Washington policymaking machine, where popular ideas can quickly become canon and leave little room for debate.
“The danger whenever you have this consensus is it evolves into an echo chamber that boxes in the administration, as opposed to supporting them and giving them the tools they need for long-term competition,” said Evan Medeiros, a professor at Georgetown University who served as a director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia on Obama’s National Security Council (NSC).
With the China hawks flying high, is there any way to escape the slow roll toward crisis?
In the summer of 1994, U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry sent a memo to top military brass about the future of U.S.-China relations. China, Perry wrote, is “fast becoming the world’s largest economic power, and that combined with its [permanent U.N. Security Council] status, its political clout, its nuclear weapons and a modernizing military, make China a player with which the United States must work together.”
Perry was getting ready for a trip to China later that fall, as the Clinton administration was seeking to forge closer ties with Beijing. The relationship had been frozen following the Chinese government’s brutal crackdown on protests that culminated in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In his 1994 memo, Perry instructed the service chiefs to start opening talks with their Chinese counterparts, noting that the “military relationship with China could pay significant dividends for [the U.S. Defense Department].”
The memo showcased what would become the prevailing viewpoint in Washington for decades—one of optimistic engagement. With careful diplomacy and continued economic cooperation, this line of thinking went, the United States could help shepherd China into its role as an emerging global power and integrate it into the post-World War II international system. The Cold War was over, and the Soviet Union was in disarray. This was a unipolar world at the “end of history,” and U.S. policymakers were sure they could domesticate the dragon just as they beat the bear.
The Clinton administration began outreach efforts, especially in trade. These reached their apex under President George W. Bush, when China finally joined the World Trade Organization and started its two-decade march to become, by some measures, the largest economy in the world.
That march lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty and was one of the most spectacular economic transformations in history. But it came at a cost for people in rich countries, especially the United States, who saw their share of global trade and manufacturing gradually gobbled up by low-cost Chinese competition. China’s share of global GDP skyrocketed from 1.6 percent in 1990 to 16 percent in 2017, and the U.S. annual trade deficit with China exploded to more than $375 billion.
Perry’s memo would be heresy in today’s Washington, where lawmakers are champing at the bit to reorient the United States to compete with China. House Republicans, with broad backing from Democrats, have established a select committee on China to oversee the U.S. government’s strategic shift against Beijing, and the State Department is busy building out a China House to monitor and blunt Beijing’s growing economic and political footprint in places such as Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. The Biden administration has not only maintained trade tariffs enacted under former President Donald Trump but also escalated an offensive against Chinese technology.
“We need to reduce our economic dependency on China. We need to make sure that we are surging hard power west of the international dateline in defending Taiwan,” Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, the chairman of the new China committee, said in December, before the new Congress started. “The Chinese Communist Party is our foremost threat in the world today.”
Meanwhile, other U.S. lawmakers are in and out of Taiwan in a steady stream of trips that have incensed officials in Beijing.
One of those lawmakers is Republican Sen. Todd Young, who visited Taiwan to meet President Tsai Ing-wen in January. “Because the CCP has engaged in coercion and in the threat of further coercion, it makes sense for people like myself to demonstrate that we’re not going to back down in the face of that,” he told Foreign Policy.
Top U.S. military and Biden administration officials assess that China has set its sights on recapturing Taiwan, even via military means, with some predicting a conflict in the next two to five years—though those assessments aren’t shared by everyone in Washington.
That has put the United States in a pickle. Officially, Washington still adheres to the “One China” policy, where it limits its formal diplomatic recognition to Beijing and only supports Taipei on the sly. But Biden in various interviews has gone above and beyond the strictures of that policy, vowing to defend Taiwan militarily if China should invade.
With similar signals coming from Capitol Hill, no China watcher can point to one single moment when the wheels started coming off the roughly 50-year plan of integration with China. Instead, it was a series of moments, mishaps, and scandals. One of those seminal moments involved a young college graduate from Michigan, $120 in cash, and a woman who called herself “Amanda.”
In December 2009, a 28-year-old Michigan native, Glenn Shriver, received word that he was to report to Washington, D.C., to begin the process of joining the CIA. For the past four years, Shriver, who had lived and worked in Shanghai as a teacher, had sought out a career in U.S. national security, repeatedly taking and failing the U.S. foreign service entrance exam before applying to the CIA.
Through all the job applications for secretive positions, Shriver was holding onto a secret of his own: Chinese intelligence officials were grooming him to be a spy. It began in Shanghai, where the cash-strapped college graduate was living when he answered a job listing in a newspaper ad to write a report on U.S.-China relations. A woman who called herself “Amanda” paid him $120 for it. From there, “Amanda” and other agents of China’s premier state intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security, began paying him tens of thousands of dollars to apply for U.S. government jobs with the State Department and CIA, as U.S. attorneys would later recount in public documents on the case.
U.S. law enforcement officials caught wind of the gambit, and Shriver was detained and eventually pleaded guilty to attempting to spy for China. But his case served as a shot across the bow for the U.S. national security and intelligence world: China was upping its espionage game in the United States. Shriver was one of nearly 60 defendants who faced federal prosecution over charges of attempting to spy for China during a three-year period alone between 2008 and 2011. For those in intelligence and law enforcement, the Shriver case was emblematic of a new, increasingly aggressive China. For policymakers, that realization would only come much later.
When Shriver was nabbed by the FBI, Obama had yet to meet with Xi at Sunnylands, and then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was still a year away from declaring a U.S. “pivot” to Asia.
There were plenty of diplomatic initiatives that suggested U.S.-China relations weren’t destined for disaster. China helped Obama seal the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. It started cooperating on climate change and on ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and even proffered some olive branches on the military front. In 2014, the United States extended an invitation to China to participate in the big annual multinational military exercise in the Pacific Ocean, known as RIMPAC.
Still, a small but growing chorus of China hawks in Washington began gaining traction in policy debates on the economic and political fronts, spurred at least in part by Shriver’s and other high-profile espionage cases. And then Xi fed the fire.
China announced a massive, multibillion-dollar global infrastructure investment program in 2013, later dubbed the Belt and Road Initiative, aimed at building infrastructure in Eurasia, exporting China’s excess economic capacity, and connecting new global trade routes. Some in Washington likened it to an economic Trojan horse that allowed Beijing to wield infrastructure projects and public debt in foreign countries for geopolitical influence. Then, in 2015, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management revealed that Chinese hackers had swiped sensitive data for more than 22 million current, former, and prospective federal workers, as well as their friends and family, a breach that alarmed U.S. officials and heightened tensions.
China also began a campaign of building artificial islands in the contested South China Sea. It stacked them with military-capable airfields and infrastructure that could threaten important international sea lanes in the region. “Concerns began to grow, particularly toward the end of the Obama administration with China’s reclamation in the South China Sea,” said Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor at Cornell University and former senior advisor to the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department.
Obama’s face-to-face meetings with Xi began to grow increasingly frosty following the 2013 Sunnylands meeting, as the diplo-speak of international summits shifted from “warm” exchanges to “candid” discussions on “significant concerns,” barely containing a groundswell of tensions between the major powers. In China, a newer, more aggressive strain of anti-Americanism and nationalism swept through the CCP under Xi’s leadership. Even the goodwill gesture of inviting China to RIMPAC came with its own dour footnote: China dispatched four ships to the exercise but also quietly sent one uninvited spy ship to snoop.
By late 2016, during Obama’s final year in office, the high hopes of the U.S. strategy of integration with China were beginning to fade—and fast. “Where we see them violating international rules and norms … we’ve been very firm, and we’ve indicated to them that there will be consequences,” Obama told CNN that September.
Under Xi’s predecessor Hu, “there was still hope of additional opening and liberalization of the economy and perhaps the government,” said Cole Shepherd, a former China specialist at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. But during Xi’s second five-year term, he said, “things started to change, primarily when it became clear that Xi Jinping was not going to continue down the liberal or opening-up road of Hu Jintao and [Hu’s predecessor] Jiang Zemin.”
At the G-20 meeting in Hangzhou, China, just days after Obama’s CNN interview, Chinese authorities rolled out the red carpet for a slew of world leaders. Chinese officials never sent the rolling staircase to Air Force One, forcing Obama to leave the aircraft through a less-than-dignified maintenance entrance in the plane’s belly in what was seen as a calculated diplomatic snub.
“You had China building artificial islands in the South China Sea. You had Chinese engaging in cybertheft of intellectual property in the hundreds of billions of dollars range. You had an inability to address a range of economic issues, with China shifting to a much more state-led, state-driven economy at the expense of market-based actors and the private sector,” said Paul Haenle, the director’s chair at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former NSC director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia under both Bush and Obama. “These all emerged as real challenges between the U.S. and China, and that was before Trump came into office.”
What came next would only make things worse.
David Feith was a firsthand witness to the sea change in U.S.-China relations. From 2013 to 2017, he worked for the Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong, tracking how China’s economic rise had led to a surge in corporate espionage and assertive state trade policies even as the United States and China deepened their economic relationship. At that point, bilateral U.S.-China trade totaled $636 billion a year, amounting to the largest trade relationship in the world, and U.S. exports to China supported nearly 2 million U.S. jobs.
From afar, Feith also witnessed the political rise of Trump and the dramatic 2016 presidential race that put Trump in the White House and left the Washington establishment (and most everyone else) stunned. Trump distinguished himself from previous presidents by repeatedly bashing China for cheating the United States on trade and intellectual property. “We’re like the piggybank that’s being robbed,” he declared on the campaign trail in 2016. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country. And that’s what they’re doing. It’s the greatest theft in the history of the world.”
If Trump’s sharp, blunt style struck a nerve for voters in the heartland, it did the same for a nascent class of China hawks back in Washington, who grew frustrated by what they saw as an outdated mode of wishful thinking on China policy.
The Chinese, by their conduct, “had demonstrated that they absolutely [did] not want to be a responsible stakeholder in a U.S.-led liberal global order and, in fact, they were hostile toward that order and wanted to revise and subvert it,” Feith said.
Feith decided to jump from journalism into the game and in early 2017 joined the Trump administration. He was brought into the State Department by Brian Hook, the then-head of the department’s Policy Planning Staff (a sort of in-house think tank for the State Department), and began working to turn Trump’s campaign platform into U.S. foreign policy. It would turn decades of consensus on U.S. China policy on its head.
Beyond moving to dismantle economic ties in a sweeping trade war, the Trump administration slapped restrictions on the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, ramped up weapons sales to Taiwan, and launched the now-defunct China Initiative, a program that, while created to crack down on IP theft, also fueled suspicion and scrutiny of Asian American researchers. In a parting shot, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo used his last day in office to declare that Beijing’s human rights violations in Xinjiang amounted to genocide.
Nadia Schadlow, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and former U.S. deputy national security advisor for strategy under Trump, said growing domestic frustration and concern surrounding three key sectors—manufacturing, defense, and human rights—all converged to drive these shifts under the Trump administration. It was a “sober wake-up call to what had been happening,” she said.
In 2020, the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a further breakdown in U.S.-China relations, especially as Trump insisted on referring to the virus as the “Chinese virus” and the origins of the pandemic became the subject of geopolitical suspicion. China poisoned the waters further with a brash new form of so-called “wolf warrior” diplomacy, lashing out at countries that blamed its mishandling of the initial outbreak for the pandemic and spreading bizarre conspiracy theories that the virus originated in U.S. biolabs in Ukraine. Months later, Beijing launched a sweeping crackdown on Hong Kong, sparking a frantic mass exodus as residents scrambled to escape the city—and further ingraining antagonistic sentiment in Washington.
“2020 was a year of unceasing action against China,” said Scott Kennedy, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The Chinese made it very easy to be hawkish because of the pandemic, the way they responded to individual actions, and their overall tone.”
Newly minted U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken sat across from then-Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in a conference room at the Hotel Captain Cook in Anchorage, Alaska, flanked by top advisors and a row of U.S. and Chinese flags. Though both donned face masks, as a precaution against COVID-19, it was clear no one was smiling.
It was less than two months into Biden’s term in office, and Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and a cadre of other top Biden aides had traveled to Alaska for the administration’s first formal face-to-face with Chinese officials. Chinese state media outlets portrayed the meeting as an opportunity to turn the page on the Trump era. Most, including those on the U.S. side, expected the meeting to follow the typical format of a carefully choreographed meet-and-greet.
Instead, they got fireworks. Senior Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi railed against the complaints the U.S. side brought to the table, accusing Washington of plunging U.S.-China relations into a “period of unprecedented difficulty.”
“There is no way to strangle China,” he said. Blinken, on the defensive, accused Beijing of actions that “threaten the rules-based order that maintains global stability.”
Yang was playing to the audience back home. Biden was no Trump, but the diplomatic showdown in Anchorage was the clearest sign yet that both sides had misplaced the reset button.
Biden vowed to reverse the remnants of Trump’s foreign-policy agenda. But when it comes to addressing China, Biden’s position remains remarkably similar to his predecessor’s. Many of the main fixtures of Trump’s legacy—including tariffs and his administration’s declaration that Beijing’s crimes in Xinjiang constituted genocide—are still firmly in place. In some respects, Biden has gone further.
“I think a lot of people were surprised at how tough the Biden administration came out of the box,” said Haenle, the former NSC China hand. “The Biden administration put a lot of emphasis on wanting to maintain that bipartisan approach, not wanting the Republicans to sort of claim that they’re tougher on China than the Democrats.”
Two years in, Biden’s presidency has been marked by a full-throttle campaign against China’s tech sector, as he unleashed punishing new export controls targeting China’s semiconductor industry and now weighs severing Huawei’s ties to U.S. suppliers. On Taiwan, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have rallied to his side after his comments on defending the island militarily if China were to launch an invasion.
Those off-the-cuff remarks have raised eyebrows about the decades-old U.S. doctrine of “strategic ambiguity,” which is now so ambiguous that it’s not just the Chinese who are confused about what the United States might do if Chinese shells start falling on Taipei.
That has left relations in a precarious position. “It is a dangerous situation, but having said that, I think that all the three parties—China, Taiwan, and the United States—all recognize the danger,” said Cheng Li, the director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. “It’s not inevitable, but it’s a downward spiral. It’s caused by mutually reinforced fear … and animosity.”
It’s hard to find much in Congress that gets bipartisan support, but in late September 2022, lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee did just that with the Taiwan Policy Act.
The act, which later passed in an altered form as part of a massive defense policy bill, was considered one of the most comprehensive overhauls of U.S.-Taiwan relations when drafted—and served as a warning to Beijing that Congress was doubling down on support for Taiwan. Although lawmakers ultimately stopped short of formally designating Taiwan as a major non-NATO ally, one of the Taiwan Policy Act’s most contentious proposals, they set aside up to $2 billion in loans for Taiwan to procure weapons. The initial bill passed through the Senate committee by a 17-5 vote, but among the handful of holdouts were some of Biden’s most important allies in Congress.
“The policy we’ve had on Taiwan has been at its heart of success, and this is not a moment to scrap it,” said Murphy, the Democratic senator. “Proponents of the Taiwan Policy Act would say it does not scrap the ‘One China’ policy and it does not create an explicit security guarantee. While that’s technically true, it comes very close. It’s creating a brand-new Taiwan policy at a moment when many of us don’t believe we need it.”
Depending on whom you ask, it’s either a last gasp of the doves or an opening rift in the Democratic Party’s China policy between centrists and progressives.
Weiss, the Cornell professor, warned that the appearance of a China consensus in Washington has fueled groupthink. “There is a sense of, like, this is the direction that everybody is going, and it’s not politically advantageous or, from a career perspective, wise to be seen as asking too many questions about that general consensus,” she said. “That makes it harder to ask big questions about, where is this strategy taking us? Where is it leading? … How can we bend the damaging trajectory that we’re on?”
In the coming months, the House select committee on China is set to be a driving force in shaping this debate as it investigates Beijing’s influence and relationship with the United States. Gallagher, the chairman, said one of the committee’s top priorities is focusing on the long-term investments necessary to “win this new cold war with Communist China”—although such a framing could also come with dangers of its own.
“You can’t use the terminology that we used for our conflict with the Soviet Union for our conflict with China,” Murphy said. “It is apples and oranges. We had virtually no trade relationship with the Soviet Union. Our most vital trade relationship is with China. So I do worry about a bunch of Cold Warriors and Cold War enthusiasts thinking that you can run a competition with China like you ran a competition with the Soviet Union. It’s not the same thing.”
Nonetheless, the moniker seems to be sticking, perhaps because it’s the only shorthand that Americans have for an era of high-wire tensions with another superpower.
The risk in comparing souring U.S.-China relations to a new cold war is that “it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Paul Heer, a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and former U.S. national intelligence officer for East Asia. “When you call this a cold war, you are basically saying, ‘Yes, we are engaged in an existential struggle, and only one side can win.’”
Yet the consensus is growing, and Xi appears to be firmly fixed on his own ambitions—potentially leaving little room for change. His third term as CCP general secretary will end in 2027.
“You can’t dance with a partner whose feet don’t move,” said Schell of the Asia Society. “And China doesn’t want to dance yet.”
