Even though China was this month in a disputed region of the South China Sea, the US. Two carriers of aircraft have been deployed in a statement from the Navy “in order to foster a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
How near the American and Chinese warships are to each other is unknown. Nonetheless, these were some of the most horrific recent examples of how US-China ties were translated into a modern version of the Cold War by some analysts.
Tuesday came another point of inflection. First, the British government reversed its decision and declared the blow of one of China’s leading firms to devices produced by the Chinese technology company Huawei from its 5 g networks.
President Donald Trump then signed legislation and a Management Order in breach of international commitments to punish China for its conduct in the former British colony in Hong Kong. Beijing has introduced the punitive new protection act.
On Tuesday, the US Navy announced that it had carried out one of its routine “nautical privileges” operations near the conflict on the Spratly Islands by sending China’ s own water claims a guided missile-destroyer. It was the first such mission as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday declared China claims “absolutely unconstitutional” for many contested areas of the South China Sea and accused Peking of “a bullying operation.”
Chinese officials were reportedly responsible for the mass arrest, racial persecution and forcible sterilization of Muslim Uyghur minorities in China’s Xinjiang Region, U.S. law enforcement agencies, and other US officers put on Monday sanctions against U.S. rules in reprisal.
FBI Director Christopher Wray released a strong alert last week that called Chinese spying the “biggest long-lasting threat to intellectual property, intelligence, and economic existence.”
It all came after a month of coronavirus speech, where the U.S. accused China of covering up the epidemic at first and Trump and other officials put forward a suggestion that the virus may have originated from a Chinese laboratory. The US was turned down by a Chinese official. Both the US and Army have accused China of attempting to steal vaccine technologies with hackers.
For decades, conventional US foreign policy orthodoxy held that if the West traded and collaborated with China, its political structure was slowly opened and its oppressive acts were to be curbed – from disproportionate territorial claims to economic rights to broad-based theft of intellectual property. But the trend has changed in the last few years, as Chinese President Xi Jinping has doubled in hard-line stance.
Nowadays, former Vice-President Joe Biden and his opponent, Trump, have been hot on the advertisements on who is better in China. And there are few, if any, allies in Congress on either side.
“We have come a long way,” says Silverado Policy Accelerator Think Tank chairman Dmitri Alperovich. He was among the first specialists in cybersecurity to recognize China’s government-sponsored hacking activities in the public domain. “It is a matter of bipartisan agreement in a city with such deep political divisions: that China is no friend of America.”
In his speech last week at the Beijing Think Tank, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that relations between China and the US are “faced with the most serious problems since diplomatic ties were formed.”
The Chinese politics of America “dependent on unacceptable strategic mistakes and is full of emotions and impulses and racism from McCarthy.” He said.
“It has been time for Xi to drive the US for the past five years – and now its time for China to be the hegemon in the world,” he said. “It means he will fight with us. It may not be a fresh Cold War, but it will certainly be a confrontation.”
The Cold War comparison doesn’t fit as scholars agree that there were two opposing political and economic regimes that were independent and distinct in the post-World War II conflict between the United States-led West and the Soviet-dominated East.
Bipartite attempts were also made to improve government investment, for example, artificial intelligence and quantum computing, in areas of US-China technology competition.
In June, Chuck Schumer of New York, a senate minority leader, collaborated on a bill to promote semiconductor production in the United States with Tom Cotton of Arkansas, one of the Senate’s most conservative republicans.
“By the moment Tom Cotton and Chuck Schumer come together there are not many issues,” said Scharre.
