An author and senior Transatlantic fellow with the Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS) considers the speed with which the West came to a very different consensus on China quite remarkable.
Andrew Small, the author of “No Limits: The Inside Story of China's War with the West,” participated in a CSIS Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program podcast on Nov. 18 to discuss the findings in his book and China's global ambitions and its future risks for the U.S. and Europe.
“It's just incredibly timely because as the United States and Europe are looking ahead and how to deal with the China challenge, it has really put brought to the fore the importance of getting on the same page as an alliance,” Max Bergmann, director of the Europe Program and Stuart Center, said during the CSIS webinar book event. “And that's critical both in how we engage Russia. How we engage Ukraine, but also fundamentally how we engage this momentous challenge of the century.”
Small said a broad swathe of countries across the industrialized world revisited their fundamental assumptions on China. They overhauled the policies that had governed their approach for decades and are openly cooperating with each other in their collective response.
Policymakers almost use the term "systemic rival" for China casually, he said. It appears in reports and papers from the G7 and NATA communities and op-eds by the German Chancellor almost as a matter of routine, which Small said was a dramatic shift.
The U.S.-China relationship had been characterized by military balancing and a significant level of cooperating on the economic and technological sphere, he said. Europe was peripheral for any U.S. policymaker working on Asia.
“Essentially we were entering a phase in which economic, technological and even ideological competition with China was going to be at the core of the US approach,” he said.
The idea that it would be only about U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific was off the mark with all the technological, economic, financial and regulatory power on the other side of the Atlantic, he said.
After the German Business Association (BDI) labeled China a systemic competitor, the European Union produced what Small said was a more remarkable paper calling China a systemic rival.
“I think it’s no exaggeration to say that what’s taken place since then, is a complete revolution in how Europe thinks and deals with China, and how Europe and the United States deal with each other on China,” he said.
It took some serious shocks to make this happen, he said. Three of those included 5G infrastructure for wireless communications and the Trump administration’s big rethink, the pandemic and the No Limits agreement between China and Russia on the eve of the Ukraine war.
“This convergence of views that the book describes – whether it’s from the Department of Defense, on the one hand, the BDI, ostensibly at the other end of the spectrum – that China’s technological catch-up was going to pose military threats, threats to our economic future, far faster than people had expected,” Small said.
Coalition building in the West remains in the early stages, he said.
“The first part of it is, can a coalition that cuts across major industrialized democracies get critical elements of their approach are roughly in line with each other in light of China’s rise?” he asked.
Lily McElwee, a fellow in the Freeman Chair in China Studies and CSIS-Chumir Global Dialogue, named several points made in the book as significant, including the transformative effect of COVID on EU public opinion on China. Another point was the role that U.S.-EU relations have played in EU debate on China.
“I was struck by how the U.S. has in some cases been its own worst enemy in moving European debate on China in the direction they want,” she said. “And then you go into Merkel-Trump interactions and the impact of the Snowden revelations on the Huawei decision.”
