Barking Chinese Never Bite

Beijing's vociferous threats over bill supporting Hong Kong laughable, China expert 
Edmund DeMarche 

Gordon Chang, the author of "The Coming Collapse of China," said Thursday that Beijing’s threats of taking "countermeasures" over the U.S. law backing the protests in Hong Kong are “laughable” and that China is in no position to anger its best customer as its economy slumps.
Beijing was quick to admonish President Trump and Congress for passing two bills aimed at supporting human rights in Hong Kong. 

The Chinese foreign ministry said in a statement that the bills will only "strengthen the resolve of the Chinese people, including the Hong Kong people, and raise the sinister intentions and hegemonic nature of the U.S.," and promised vague "countermeasures."
Chang said in an email that anything Beijing can do "will hurt itself more than us, and given how close its economy is to the edge of the cliff the regime could end up doing itself in by retaliating."
He continued, "For four decades, we were told by elites and policymakers that we could not afford to upset China. Wednesday, President Trump did what his predecessors would not do — defend America from a China that is going after us. The same power that is encroaching on Hong Kong’s autonomy is attacking our society across the board."

Hong Kong, a former British colony that was granted semi-autonomy when China took control in 1997, has been rocked by six months of sometimes violent pro-democracy demonstrations after an extradition bill surfaced last summer that – if passed – would have sent alleged "criminals" in Hong Kong to China for trial.
The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which was sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., requires that the U.S. conducts yearly reviews into Hong Kong’s autonomy from Beijing. 

If ever found unsatisfactory, the city's special status for U.S. trading could be tossed.

Up until Wednesday's announcement, President Trump did not indicate whether or not he would sign the bill. 

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo refused to answer a reporter's question about the president's leanings as recent as Tuesday.
"I signed these bills out of respect for President Xi, China, and the people of Hong Kong," President Trump said in a statement. 

"They are being enacted in the hope that Leaders and Representatives of China and Hong Kong will be able to amicably settle their differences leading to long term peace and prosperity for all."
The bills were applauded by protesters who see them as a warning to Beijing and Hong Kong.
"In any event, let the Chinese huff and puff over the bills President Trump signed," Chang wrote.

"Wednesday was a great day for America, and a great day for free societies across the world."

Sen. Cruz urges Trump administration to block China’s next UN power play

By Ben Evansky

Sen. Ted Cruz is calling on the Trump administration to block China from installing a controversial former head of the Hong Kong police force at the helm of a United Nations office meant to fight drug trafficking, organized crime and corruption.
China’s candidate Andy Tsang-Wai-hung was nominated by Beijing earlier this summer to be the next executive director of the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). 

His candidacy, critics warn, marks yet another sign of China’s growing influence at the world body.
The annual budget of the organization for the year is around a quarter-billion dollars. 

Texas Republican Sen. Cruz -- who has sponsored legislation to halt Chinese infiltration on U.S. campuses and research institutions -- told Fox News in a statement that such Chinese efforts need to be stymied.
"The Chinese Communist Party has systematically pursued a policy of joining and exploiting international organizations to advance their agenda. The pattern is the same across issues as varied as the WTO, Internet governance, Interpol, and human rights bodies,” he said.
The Texas senator who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called on the administration to make sure Beijing is halted in its ambitions.
“The UN has no business putting yet another Communist Party cutout in a leadership position, especially one with a direct history of advancing China's abuses in Hong Kong. The Trump administration should use its voice and vote to block this appointment."
As Hong Kong police chief in 2014, Tsang was responsible for putting down pro-democracy protesters who demanded democratic elections for chief executive. 

More recently he served as China’s deputy director for its narcotics control commission.
Gordon Chang, a China expert, told Fox News that Tsang was “known to be a hardliner” when he ran the Hong Kong police.
“[He] headed the police in 2014 when the police used tear gas during the Occupy protests," Chang said. 

"The use of tear gas reignited the protests as ordinary citizens immediately turned off their televisions and took to the streets to show their indignation. Tsang, whether he made the decision to use tear gas or merely followed the orders of Chief Executive C. Y. Leung, was held responsible for one of the worst moves during that time.”
Chang also noted Tsang’s current position. 

“Any candidate proposed for a drug enforcement post by a one-party state behind some of the world's most dangerous drug networks should be rejected out of hand.” 

He said Tsang did not stop China's fentanyl rings “even though he had all the tools of a semi-totalitarian state at his disposal.”
He asked: “Is he really going to be more effective because he would move to Vienna? This would be a hideous appointment.”
China in recent years has become the second-largest contributor to the U.N. after the U.S., and has sought to widen its sphere of influence. 

It now runs four out of 15 U.N. specialized agencies.
A State Department official recently stated to Fox News that the U.S. was not retreating from the U.N. and said the administration was well aware of China’s ambitions.
“China’s concerted push has more to do with advancing its self-serving interests and authoritarian model than demonstrating genuine leadership consistent with the principles and fundamental freedoms enshrined in the U.N Charter,” the official said.
And while some diplomats at the U.N. feel Tsang’s candidacy is unlikely to result in another win for China, the government's U.N. engagement is on full display all the same.
A Heritage Foundation report titled, “How the U.S. Should Address Rising Influences at the United Nations,” authored by senior research fellow Brett Schaefer, noted China’s rise at the U.N. is “not a recent phenomenon.” 

The claim runs against news reports that assert China’s ascension is due to the Trump administration's pullback from the world body.
The report also said the U.S. should “focus its effort and resources on countering Chinese influence, advancing U.S. policy preferences, and increasing employment of U.S. nationals, particularly in senior positions, in those organizations whose remit affects key U.S. interests.”
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is expected to announce his pick for the Vienna job in the coming months.

Chinazism

How China's challenge will be met by America is a critical question – and we must answer soon

By Gordon G. Chang

Critics charge a senior State Department official with making racist comments at a think tank event in late April, triggering a firestorm in usually staid China policy circles.
The comments, about the nature of the Chinese challenge to America, highlight Washington’s urgent need to agree to a long-term strategy to confront China’s Communist Party.
The growing controversy erupted over words from Director of Policy Planning Kiron Skinner on April 29 in Washington, D.C. at the Future Security Forum 2019, an event sponsored by the New America think tank. 

“This is a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology, and the United States hasn’t had that before,” she said in a conversation with Anne-Marie Slaughter, one of her predecessors at Policy Planning.
Later in the event, Skinner, trying to put China’s challenge in the context of the Soviet Union’s, said this: “It’s also striking that this is the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.”

Her choice of “Caucasian” appears to be part of the larger narrative that China is far different from other challengers to the American-led international system. 

She correctly said that many Americans, even those in the foreign policy community, do not understand the “historical, ideological, and cultural, as well as strategic factors” relevant to the “long-term fight with China.”
Skinner’s isolated reference to “Caucasian” was, of course, inaccurate as she forgot about Japan during the Second World War, but the use of the word is not inapt as Americans have not come to grips with the Chinese Communist Party’s inherently racist appeals to what is now known as “Han chauvinism.”
In short, America needs to have a frank conversation about how Communist Party racism plays into its competition with the United States. 

As Georgia Tech’s Fei-Ling Wang pointed out in “The China Order: Centralia, World Empire, and the Nature of Chinese Power,” the Communist Party has tried, since coming to power in 1949, to bring back imperial-era notions of tianxia, the concept that the Chinese emperor is the Son of Heaven and rules all under it.

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has been especially aggressive promoting this race-based idea, employing tianxia-era language in official pronouncements for more than a decade. 

“The Chinese have always held that the world is united and all under heaven are one family,” he declared in his 2017 New Year’s Message.
Skinner has raised critical issues that Washington policymakers have not wanted to discuss.
Benign sentiments? 

If his own words were not clear enough, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in “Study Times,” the Central Party School newspaper, in September 2017 wrote that Xi’s “thought on diplomacy”—a “thought” in Communist Party lingo signals important ideological concepts—“has made innovations on and transcended the traditional Western theories of international relations for the past 300 years.”

Wang with his time reference is almost certainly pointing to the “Westphalian” system of sovereign states, established by the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. 

His use of “transcended,” consequently, hints that Xi wants a world where only China is recognized as sovereign.
All this brings us back to Skinner’s “clash of civilizations” narrative. 

In the comments referring to the thesis of the late Samuel Huntington of Harvard, she was making the perfectly valid point that Chinese leaders do not share fundamental assumptions with their counterparts.
The tianxia concept of sole Chinese sovereignty is ridiculed by many of China’s scholars and would almost certainly be rejected by China’s citizens if they were asked about it. 

Tianxia views, therefore, are not widely shared across “Chinese civilization,” if that term has any meaning. 

Nonetheless, the Communist Party’s promotion of the concept is a warning sign that the gulf between China’s and America’s leaders is far wider than assumed here.
Yet the distinction between the civilizational and non-civilizational nature of the challenge is largely academic. 

The important point for Americans is that the extraordinarily paranoid Xi Jinping, with his continual use of tianxia-like language, is speaking as if he represents a Chinese civilization, and state media, in the form of the Communist Party’s “Global Times,” has been bolstering Xi’s view of civilizational struggle. 

Xi’s perception suggests we are in an existential fight with him and his ruling group.
Skinner in her comments referenced the first person to hold her position, George Kennan, the famous Mr. “X” of a landmark article in “Foreign Affairs” and the author of the Long Telegram, the foundations of America’s containment strategy of the Soviet Union. 

“You can’t have a policy without an argument underneath it,” she told Slaughter.
Yes, and you can’t develop a workable policy unless it is supported by a nation-wide consensus as to what your adversary stands for. 

That consensus does not now exist.
Skinner has raised critical issues that Washington policymakers have not wanted to discuss. 

How Americans meet China’s challenge depends on the answers to the questions she has now, thankfully, forced us to confront.

The Establishment Goes Trump on China

A new consensus is emerging, and it sounds a lot like what the president has said all along.
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
President Trump takes part in a welcoming ceremony with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in Beijing, November 9, 2017.

Read recent essays on China. 

Visit think-tank public symposia. 

Hear out military analysts. 

Talk with academics and media pundits. 

Listen to Silicon Valley grandees. 

Watch Senate speeches and politicians interview on television.
The resulting new groupspeak is surreal. 

If one excises the word “Trump,” what follows is a seemingly revolutionary recalibration of attitudes toward China that more or less echo Trump’s voice in the wilderness and often crude and shrill warnings dating back from the campaign trail of 2015.
Trump’s second secretary of state, the skillful Mike Pompeo, has been institutionalizing the president’s pessimistic view of China. 

Insightful but heretofore underappreciated assessments from China scholars such as Miles Yu and Gordon Chang are now being taking seriously. 

Both have been warning us for years that the Chinese seek domination, not accommodation, and are replacing their erstwhile feigned respect for our strength with an emboldened contempt for our growing weakness, whether real or psychological. 

Both have warned also that once China achieves military, economic, and cultural parity with the United States, the global order will be quite different from that of the last 75 years.
From the military, one hears more frequently now that we were at a tipping point by late 2016: The Obama Asian pivot had failed — publicly provocative, but in reality without substance, giving the lethal impression of real weakness masked by empty rhetoric. 

The Chinese militarization of the Spratly Islands was conceded as the inevitable future of the South China Sea. 

Chinese military and weapons doctrine was aimed at destroying the offensive capability of the U.S. fleet in the Pacific as a way of breaking off allies from America, and then Finlanding them.
From 2009 to 2016, our defense readiness was eroding, China’s increasing. 

Psychologically, the American military could not reassure the global order that China would not one day soon unleash North Korea, absorb Taiwan, emasculate South Korea and Japan, or isolate the Philippines and Australia. 

Huge and mercantile Chinese trade surpluses with all its Western trading partners were accepted as normal.
The cash-short Pentagon seemed to shrug that America was the victim of cosmic and historic forces that inevitably would dethrone the United States, analogous to the declinism of the 1930s, when a powerful U.S. 7th Fleet was not able to deter a modern rising Japanese navy from carving out what would become the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere based on perceptions of American impotence and weariness and spent European colonialism.
In Silicon Valley, the good old news of making trillions of dollars over the last 30 years in outsourcing assemblage to China, opening up a huge new Chinese consumer market, and entering joint partnerships has insidiously been eclipsed by the growing reality that our techie masters of the universe were instead deluded Dr. Frankensteins who had helped to birth an unstoppable monster.
Technology was stolen, either by espionage inside the U.S. or by formalized theft as the cost of doing business inside China. 

Copyrights and patents did not bother China. 

The scale of environmental damage inside China did not diminish, but accelerated and was manifested abroad. 

There was no sense of symmetry; in dealing with China, the idea of commercial reciprocity, shared environmental protocols, generalized notions of international commerce — all that simply did not exist. 

And the reason it did not exist wasn’t sloppiness or insensitivity; it did not exist by design, owing to the Chinese’s arrogance that they were the rising sun and the U.S. was in its twilight — with a few exceptions granted to some of the Western elite who were getting rich largely by accommodating the Chinese warping of trade and technological theft.
Financially challenged colleges and universities had come to rely on full-tuition-paying Chinese students. 

When stories spread that some Chinese students were acting as organs of the Chinese Communist Party, actively engaging in espionage, or illiberally bullying any critics of China, colleges either ignored such news or regarded its bearers as racists and xenophobes.
Chinese college students who mouthed government talking points were strangely rebranded, in identity-politics fashion, as the victimized Other, and to be accorded the usual accruing exemptions. In sum, China was considered a politically correct entity. 

Or better yet, it was seen as a cash cow for struggling liberal-arts colleges and so properly immune from any suggestion that it sent thousands of its citizens abroad to absorb or expropriate Western technology without contamination from taboo liberal ideas. 

While the U.S. obsessed over “Russian collusion” from a thuggish but comparative weak Vladimir Putin, no one worried much about the increasingly boldness of Chinese espionage and cyber sabotage. 

In Tolkienesque terms of relative threats, Putin played Saruman to a Chinese Sauron.
This willful blindness was similar again to the denseness of Europe and the United States from 1880 to 1920, when Japan had sent tens of thousands of students and liaisons abroad to learn everything from nautical and aviation engineering to assembly-line fabrication and sophisticated steel production. 

The West, in condescending and racist fashion, was flattered: Such emulation must be proof of Japan’s inferiority and desires to become a Westernized (albeit junior) free-market democracy.
In fact, Japanese expropriation was done in a context of arrogance and bitterness over not receiving commensurate recognition after World War I. 

Japan assumed that whatever was stolen from the West could be improved by superior Japanese discipline, order, and national unity and purpose — far better craftsmanship without the drag of research-and-development costs.
Our diplomats for decades had assured Americans that Chinese trade imbalances, technological theft, gratuitous bullying in the air and sea, disdain for U.S. Asian allies, rampant espionage, and contempt for the postwar commercial order were 50-year-old “growing pains” — the Tiananmen Square road bumps on the inevitable path to liberal society and consensual government.

The arrogant Western idea was that just as free-market economics (rather than jaded mercantilism, dictatorship, and government monopolies) had enriched the Chinese, so too would the accruing bounty “liberalize” Chinese society, ensure an “aware” consumer class, and impress on the country that Western popular culture and politics were just as inevitable and attractive as had been Western profit-making. 

Or economists and investors insisted that cheap imported Chinese goods meant that the stagnant wages of the middle classes would not matter so much at Walmart — while American business would be forced to be leaner and more efficient to survive the cutthroat competition.
The net result was to ignore or contextualize China’s civil-rights abuses, contaminated products, religious persecution, flagrant international aggression, attacks on the postwar global order, neo-colonialism, and abject racism on the grounds these sins were comparable to our own 19th-century bouts with such illiberality — or in some perverse way in the long run even beneficial to the United States.
Again, American finance and corporations invested full bore in Chinese joint projects, offshored, and outsourced — at the price of giving away key American technological and strategic advantages, hollowing out American red-state industrial and manufacturing capacity, and weakening the nation’s cyber and conventional military security.
The idea seemed to be that if a few thousand multimillionaires got even far more fabulously rich by acquiescing to Chinese mercantilism, they could not do real harm to the vast and powerful U.S. 

Or perhaps, given inevitable American decline, the idea was that they should get their profits in now, before the American golden goose was put out of its misery.
In all these areas and more, a new consensus, among left and right, is now settling in that we are at a crossroads with China. 

Any more appeasement and acquiescence will lose the West its Asian allies, who will be forced to go with the ascendant superpower, not the declining one.
Either the U.S. military recalibrates or it will return to its 1930s stature of a powerful but vastly overextended Pacific navy and air force. 

We have reached a cultural nexus at which any more acquiescence would institutionalize the idea that to object to Chinese piracy is to indulge in hurtful stereotypes and therefore should be replaced with appeasement, and that giving away American technology or allowing its expropriation with a wink and nod is not treasonous but simply good business.
The establishment would like to fool itself that it came to its growing about-face on China thanks to a natural exhaustion of patience, or new data, or brilliant new exegeses. 

And that evolution may be in part true.
But far more likely, Trump’s early and relentless hammering on Chinese mercantilism, systematic cheating, and illiberality finally made the old status quo unsustainable in the face of mounting evidence.
The establishment is adopting Trump’s once-renegade stance toward China, and yet trying to immunize it from him all the same. 

So the end result seems something like the following: “That idiot Trump somehow now agrees with us on confronting China.”

The New Messiah

Steve Bannon has got a good point on China
By Heather Long 

President Trump's right-hand guy Steve Bannon has been called everything from a “mastermind” to a “racist, anti-Semite.” 

Regardless of what you think of Bannon, he just made a very good point about China.
“To me, the economic war with China is everything. We have to be maniacally focused on that,” Bannon told the American Prospect in a jaw-dropping interview that covered everything from urinating on yourself to North Korea. 

“If we continue to lose it, we're five years away, I think, 10 years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we'll never be able to recover.”
Many experts across the political spectrum say Bannon is right: China is beating up America economically, and neither the U.S. government nor U.S. businesses have done much about it for years.
“It's a weird day when I agree with Steve Bannon, but he's right on this,” says Jennifer Harris, a China expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former top staffer in Obama's State Department. 

“Going back to George W. Bush, America's policy toward China has been to ask nicely. That has not panned out well.”
Trump often points to the United States' $310 billion trade deficit with China last year as the ultimate sign of a “bad deal.” 

But that's not the real problem. 

The deficit is happening mainly because Americans are shoppers, not savers. 

People in the United States buy a lot of stuff, and that's unlikely to change.
The real issue is that the Chinese are pirating American ideas and technologies. 

In the 1990s and early 2000s, people were worried about China illegally copying movies, music and books. 

The stakes are a lot higher now as the world's top economies compete on groundbreaking technologies in cloud computing, robotics, artificial intelligence and gene editing. 

Whoever controls these technologies will dominate global business — and more.
“When historians look back at this period of history, they are not going to wonder why the Chinese were stealing U.S. intellectual property or business practices, they are going to wonder why the U.S. didn't defend itself,” says Gordon Chang, an expert on the Chinese economy and author of “The Coming Collapse of China.” 

He thinks Bannon is wise to hit China now. 

The Communist Party of China is gathering for its big conference this fall that happens only once every five years. 

Xi Jinping has a lot to lose if tensions flare with the United States.
Since the 1990s, the mantra in corporate America and the White House has been that America needs to cozy up to China. 

CEOs were salivating at getting access to the largest market on the planet: 1.4 billion Chinese. 

But it hasn't worked out like executives dreamed. 

China has deftly put up barrier after barrier to make it hard for American companies to sell in China. 

In the meantime, Chinese firms have profited and are now buying up American companies — everything from W Hotels to Silicon Valley startups. 

A Pentagon report this spring warned that China is pumping billions into hot Silicon Valley companies that are working on cutting-edge military equipment.
“China is limiting market access for U.S. companies in China, yet the Chinese wanted unfettered access to America,” says Evan Medeiros, an Asian strategist at the Eurasia Group who served as Obama's top adviser on the Asia-Pacific region. 

“We need to rethink China's very substantial access to investment in the U.S.” 

Direct Chinese investment in the U.S. is up nearly fourfold in the past two years.
Bannon has a battle plan, and he's already unleashing it. 

On Monday, the Trump administration launched an investigation into whether China is hijacking American business ideas under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act. 

At the moment, China forces U.S. companies doing business there to "share” their technology because they have to do a joint venture in order to operate in China. 

The Section 301 move is in its early stages — an initial fact-finding phase — but Bannon made it clear that he plans to push this along.
“We're going to run the tables on these guys,” he said in the interview. 

And he is prepared to do even more. 

He also mentioned bringing a lot more complaints against China for steel and aluminum dumping. On the campaign trail, Trump frequently threatened to slap massive tariffs as high as 45 percent on goods coming from China to the United States. 

CEOs hated the idea. 

It would raise costs on American consumers, they argued. 

Bannon isn't going that far. 

Instead, he's targeting his actions to go after the deeper IP issues and how China subsidizes many of its companies to give them a leg up against foreign competition. 

It would be a real wake up call to the Chinese, experts say.
“We're looking at the most serious U.S. trade action against China probably ever since China opened up,” says Derek Scissors, a China scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute who helped advise the Trump administration on the recent Section 301 move. 

Scissors has been calling for years for Chinese firms that have stolen U.S. intellectual property to be banned from doing business in the United States.
Bannon's right to take the China threat seriously, but he's also been pushing policies that would be hugely detrimental to America's competition with China. 

First and foremost: Immigration, the process by which America attracts the people who come up with so many of the great ideas that America has and China wants. 

Trump's recent proposal to cut legal immigration in half is being read around the world as a “You're not welcome here” sign. 

That's not going to help America win the global talent wars.
“Creating new IP in the United States is more important than keeping IP from China,” wrote James Andrew Lewis, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a blog post this month.
Perhaps the most surprising part of Bannon's interview this week was when he called North Korea a “sideshow.” 

Trump had tried to do a deal with China: If Chinese leaders could contain North Korea's weapons program, then Trump was ready to look the other way on trade. 

Bannon thinks that's a huge mistake — and so do a lot of people on both sides of the political aisle.
“I think Trump is making a strategic miscalculation. You need to tell the Chinese that both of these issues are important and both need to be addressed on their own,” Medeiros says.
Whether Bannon can put his ideas into practice is another question, as there are vested interests in at least parts of the status quo. 

The biggest obstacle Bannon faces in his quest to go after China is what he calls the “Wall Street lobby.” 

Trump's top economic advisers — Gary Cohn at the National Economic Council and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin — are former Goldman Sachs executives who don't want a trade war with China.

Scissors saw the tensions firsthand. 

He described a lot of "flipping around" on what to do.
Former Obama administration staffers such as Harris and Medeiros saw similar tensions play out in their time. 

They say the business community talks out of both sides of its mouth on China. 

CEOs complain that the Chinese government is restricting business opportunities, but when the U.S. government prepares to act, CEOs warn of a “parade of horribles” like trade wars and even a recession. 

Harris thinks it's overblown.
“I'm actually skeptical that China will retaliate, especially ahead of the party congress this year,” she says. 

The business community made the same huff and puff before the U.S. put sanctions on Russia. 

“We all woke up the next day, and European banks didn't fail and the stock market continued to go gangbusters.”
Bannon just might be able to get Trump to do what the Bush and Obama administration failed at on China. 

That is, if he can stay in the White House long enough to make it happen.

Presidential Circus

Trump backtracks on China, won't label it a currency manipulator
By Evelyn Cheng

Confirming a reversal on tough China talk, Donald Trump told The Wall Street Journal Wednesday that he will not label the Asian country a currency manipulator in a report due this week.
"They're not currency manipulators," Trump said in the interview.
The president also said putting the label on China now could jeopardize U.S. talks with Beijing on the North Korean threat, according to the Journal.
What the White House is doing is "they're going back to a very traditional China policy which is a disappointment to many of their hardcore supporters," said Gordon Chang, author of "The Coming Collapse of China." 

"There's going to be political punishment."
Trump "will be punished by autocrats in Beijing," Chang said. 

"He's showing weakness."
Slapping the label on China had been one of Trump's key campaign promises. 

He also appointed China hawks such as Peter Navarro to key positions on trade, and, until recently, favored Steve Bannon and his nationalist stance.
Now, advisors who appear to have a less protectionist viewpoint such as Gary Cohn, director of the U.S. National Economic Council and former president of Goldman Sachs, seem to have more sway over Trump.
In the Treasury Department's most recent review in October, China met only one of three criteria set down by the United States before it can label the communist country a currency manipulator. 

The Treasury is expected to update the report this month.
"The question now is whether getting Chinese cooperation on North Korea has become so important that the administration is willing to accept token gestures from China that reduce the trade deficit but do nothing to address the breadth and depth of Chinese industrial policy," said Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Sina Delenda Est: Standing Up to China Is Smart Foreign Policy

China's fifth column is making the argument to do nothing to antagonize China, even if it means forfeiting American interests and ideals. That would be a historic mistake.
By James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara

The Japan Times must be having a hard time finding copy to fill its op-ed pages. 

Exhibit A: a screed from an “adjunct senior scholar” at the Chinese Communist Party–affiliated National Institute for South China Sea Studies in Haikou, China, concerning U.S. strategy toward China in the age of Trump. 

In "Mark Valencia"’s telling, Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency has liberated “U.S. China-bashers” to have a “field day” at China’s expense. 

“Extremism” rules the day in Washington and academic precincts.
Zounds!
Wicked times are afoot, you’d think. 

But bear in mind that a lot of things look like extremism to someone who’s fronting for an extremist regime. 

To build his case "Valencia" refers obliquely to “two academics from the Naval War College.” 

The nameless academics, he says, suggest that “America should revive its past ‘daring-do’ [we think you mean derring-do, "Mark"] and ‘recognize that close quarters encounters, cat and mouse games between submarines and opposing fleets, and even deliberate collisions’ could become routine elements of the U.S.-China rivalry.”
We confess to being the scurrilous duo. 

The passages "Valencia" quotes come from an article we wrote for Orbis, a journal published by the University of Pennsylvania’s Foreign Policy Research Institute. (Look for the article here since "he" doesn’t bother furnishing a link.)
We compiled the article long before the election, and aimed it at whichever candidate might prevail. Our bottom line: China is already competing with America in the China seas and Western Pacific. Close-quarters encounters between Chinese and American ships and planes are already routine elements of the U.S.-China rivalry—just as they were between Soviet and American ships and planes during the Cold War. 

And Chinese seamen and airmen initiate these encounters.
Washington can either wrest the initiative away from Beijing, or it can remain passive and continue losing ground in the strategic competition. 

Better to seize the initiative. 

To do so the new U.S. administration must relearn the art of deterrence, and to deter Chinese aggression the administration must accept that hazards come with the territory. 

That’s Strategy 101—basic stuff for anyone fluent in statecraft.
"Valencia" is a lumper. 

He lumps our analysis with other commentators’ views, many quite different from our own, before attempting the equivalent of an op-ed drive-by shooting. 

All of our views are equivalent for him; all are expressions of “extremism.” 

The others—Gordon Chang and James Kraska, to name two—can doubtless speak up for themselves should they choose. 

We’ll stick to speaking up for ourselves.
And anyone who takes the trouble to read our item—download early, download often—will realize "Valencia" excerpts a couple of quotations out of context and retrofits them to a predetermined storyline. 

First write conclusion, then fit facts to it!
Let’s go through this point by point. 

First, Valencia implies that Trump’s victory initiated our analysis. 

“This deluge,” he opines, “was stimulated by statements by Trump and his nominees for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson and secretary of defense, James Mattis.” 

He goes on to assert that such “statements by incoming government leaders and influence peddlers provided an opportunity for America’s China hawks to promote their views.”
Wrong.
"Valencia" has it precisely backward. 

And a simple internet search would have revealed the blunder before he committed it. 

Explains Orbis editor-in-chief Mackubin Owens helpfully: “This special issue of Orbis features articles by FPRI associates offering ‘advice to the next president.’ 

Written before the election [our italics], these essays offer recommendations for national security affairs in general, as well as for regional issues.”
And so it was. 

We drafted the article in August—months ahead of the election, and when Hillary Clinton remained the odds-on favorite to win the White House. 

We assumed a Clinton administration would be the primary audience, but wrote it to advise whoever might prevail in November. 

In short, this was a nonpartisan venture, compiled in the spirit of our running counsel to the Obama administration.
And it should have bipartisan appeal.

As secretary of state, it’s worth recalling, Clinton was also the architect of America’s “pivot,” a.k.a. “rebalance,” to Asia—an undertaking aimed at counterbalancing China. 

Considering China’s record of bellicosity in maritime Asia, and considering Clinton’s diplomatic past, we had good reason to believe that she and her lieutenants would prove as receptive to our message as Trump.
More so, maybe. 

In any event: it’s misleading and false for "Valencia" to accuse us of devising “U.S. tactics in the Trump era.” 

We are devising strategy to deter a domineering China—no matter who occupies the Oval Office. 

That our article appeared after Trump prevailed represents mere happenstance.
Second, "Valencia" insinuates that we hold extremist views. 

Well, we guess so... insofar as anyone who wants to deter an aggressor from further aggression entertains extremist views. 

Deterrence involves putting an antagonist on notice that it will suffer unacceptable consequences should it take some action we wish to proscribe. 

It involves fielding military power sufficient to make good on the threat, whether the requisite capabilities be nuclear or conventional. 

And it involves convincing the antagonist we’re resolute about making good on our threats.
We’re glad to keep company with such hardnosed practitioners of deterrence as Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John Kennedy—extremists all, no doubt. 

Statesmen of yore made Moscow a believer in American power and resolve—and largely held the line against communism.
Except in that trivial sense, though, there’s nothing extreme about our argument. 

We maintain that China and the United States are pursuing irreconcilable goals in maritime Asia. 

The United States wants to preserve freedom of the sea, China wants anything but. 

Both contenders prize their goals, and both are presumably prepared to mount open-ended efforts of significant proportions to obtain those goals. 

If Beijing and Washington want nonnegotiable things a lot, then the Trump administration must gird itself for a long standoff.
Simple as that.
We also point out that China embarked on a massive buildup of maritime power over a decade ago. Excluding the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet, Beijing already boasts the largest naval and coast-guard fleets in Asia, not to mention a seagoing militia to augment its navy and coast guard. 

And these forces continue growing. 

China’s navy may number over 500 vessels by 2030. 

By contrast, the U.S. Navy espouses an eventual fleet of 355 vessels, up from 274 today. 

President Trump is on record favoring a 350-ship force. 

Defense budgets may—or may not—support a U.S. Navy that large.
These are objective facts about which the Chinese media regularly brag. 

Based on these material trends, we postulate that maritime Asia is becoming increasingly competitive, that China is a formidable competitor, and that the trendlines are running in its favor. How’s that for extreme?
We thus urge U.S. policymakers to acknowledge that the forward U.S. presence in Asia will come under mounting danger in the coming years. 

Washington may have to gamble from time to time to shore it up. 

It may have to hold things that Beijing treasures—things like the Chinese navy’s surface fleet—at risk. 

We encourage decision-makers to embrace risk as an implement of statecraft rather than shy away from it. 

Manipulating and imposing risk is a universal strategy that practitioners in Beijing routinely employ. Washington should reply in kind.
And as "Valencia" well knows—or should know—risk-taking constitutes part of the art of strategy. 

The approach we recommend is well-grounded in theory, as articulated by the late Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling and many others.
There is nothing novel about risk, then. U.S. leaders must rediscover this elemental fact. 

For too long Washington recoiled from taking risk, treating it as a liability while conflating it with recklessness. 

But a risk-averse nation has a hard time deterring: who believes a diffident statesman’s deterrent threats? 

We simply implore civilian and military leaders to realign their attitude toward risk to match the changing strategic landscape in Asia. 

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Our argument, then, is a far cry from the extremism "Valencia" deplores in his hit piece. 

A casual reader of his commentary can be pardoned for concluding that we advocate reckless action on the U.S. Navy’s part. 

But it’s "Valencia" who failed his audience.
Third, "Valencia" claims that because of recent statements from U.S. policy-makers—and by implication because of our writing, which he falsely depicts as a product of those statements—“the damage to the U.S.-China relationship and the stability of the region has already been done.” 

But what damage is he referring to? 

As of this writing, the Trump administration has been in office less than a week. 

The White House has issued no official policy touching the South China Sea. 

As far as we know, our fleets in the Western Pacific have done nothing unusual.
"Valencia", it appears, is objecting to a few China-related tweets from Trump following the November elections. 

"Valencia" is indulging in hype.
China, by contrast, has inflicted colossal damage on regional concord. 

Beijing has repeatedly intimidated the Philippines, Vietnam, and Japan in offshore areas. 

It has built islands occupying thousands of acres of land in the heart of the South China Sea. 

It has fortified these manufactured islets, breaking Xi Jinping’s pledge not to militarize them. 

It has rattled its saber through successive military drills, and issued stark warnings about war through various media mouthpieces.
And lastly, "Valencia" suggests that the United States should relinquish vital interests—including those of its Asian allies—to mollify Chinese sensibilities. 

He cites, for example, a Chinese scholar voicing concern that “The theme of clash of civilizations [is] becoming increasingly popular in Chinese circles.” 

"Valencia" also frets about “a possible Thucydian trap [we think you mean Thucydides trap, "Mark"],” a “supposedly ‘inevitable’ conflict between a status-quo power and a rising power.”
His implication, presumably, is that Washington, the guardian of the status quo, should acquiesce in Beijing’s bullying to escape the Thucydides trap. 

That would square with China’s party line. 

And indeed, aggressors do love to win peacefully.
"Valencia" further objects that the timing of a U.S. policy turnabout is inconvenient for the Chinese. 

He observes that the 19th Party Congress will convene this fall to determine China’s leadership transition. 

Xi Jinping might take a hard line in advance of the congress to placate nationalist audiences. 

A U.S. policy shift might box him in.
That may be true, but Chinese Communist Party politics cannot form the basis of U.S. foreign policy. 

Nor, it bears mentioning, do the Chinese consult or respect American political timelines as they pursue foreign-policy aims. 

Just the opposite: they regard the last months of a departing administration and early months of an incoming administration as opportune times to make mischief.
"Valencia"’s message to America is plain: do nothing to antagonize China, even if it means forfeiting American interests and ideals. 

He falls squarely into the don’t provoke China school we take to task at Orbis. 

It is precisely this camp’s thinking that begat paralysis in U.S. maritime strategy in Asia. 

Inaction is no longer tolerable as the strategic circumstances change around us.
As for the Japan Times and its readership: Japanese leaders and rank-and-file citizens should pray the Trump administration rejects "Mark Valencia"’s words. 

If the administration heeded them, it would loosen or abandon the alliance that underwrites Japan’s security and prosperity. 

That would constitute Beijing’s price for U.S.-China amity. 

And if America paid that price, surrendering the Senkaku Islands to China would represent the least of Japan’s worries. 

Dark days would lie ahead.
Let’s make China worry instead.