U.S.-China relations have moved beyond ordinary friction and entered an era of full-scale confrontation over technology transfer, military power, and the nature of the state itself.
Through Pence’s speech, Xi Jinping’s system, the reversal of Deng Xiaoping’s reform path, and Washington’s shift in strategic thinking, this essay explains why the struggle for supremacy between the United States and China is bound to become prolonged and permanent.

2019-05-30
The struggle for supremacy over technology transfer and military power, beginning with the trade war launched by President Trump, will inevitably become prolonged and permanent unless China returns in earnest to the path of reform and opening.

The following is from today’s Nikkei Shimbun, from the column “Oiso Koiso.”

The U.S.-China Confrontation Becomes the New Normal

As is well known, U.S. Vice President Pence delivered a speech at the Hudson Institute last October in which he criticized China across the board.
“We will reverse the direction taken since the days of President Nixon.
We will confront China on all fronts, not only economically.
We will not accommodate the Chinese way of thinking that places great weight on face.”
This is not mere friction.
It is confrontation.
What the United States sees as the problem is China’s state structure itself.

President Xi Jinping, a politician, acquired the title of “core” in 2016 and strengthened a cult of personality that legitimizes “Xi Jinping Thought.”
He named no successor and abolished the presidential term limit.
By “establishing one supreme figure, with a single strike of the gong determining the whole,” he has concentrated authority and power.
He is advancing a surveillance society and rule by the Communist Party over the government.

In 1971, President Nixon suddenly announced that he would visit China.
The following February, aiming to drive a wedge between China and the Soviet Union, he visited Beijing accompanied by Henry Kissinger.
After that, under the leadership of the revolutionary Deng Xiaoping, China sought a new direction.
While attempting to separate the Party from the government and institutionalize politics, it also turned toward the marketization of the economy.
This was the development of the reform and opening line.
The United States also supported China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, the WTO.

However, Xi, backed by China’s rapid economic expansion amid the wave of globalization after the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, has reversed the course of history since Deng.
He has placed the Party above the government, and reform of state-owned enterprises and other sectors has also stalled.
Through state capitalism, he is trying to seize supremacy in advanced technology and military power in place of the United States.

In the late 1980s, when Japan’s gross domestic product, GDP, exceeded 50 percent of that of the United States, America demanded yen appreciation from Japan.
It pressed hard for voluntary export restraints, market opening, domestic demand expansion, and structural reform.
The same is true now.
Today, with China’s GDP reaching nearly 70 percent of that of the United States, the pressure on China as the number-two power, advancing under the still highly peculiar system led by the Communist Party, will continue at a level even greater than what was once directed at Japan.

China will likely try to buy time, avoiding direct resistance and avoiding a Cold War, but in the United States this spring, for example, the Committee on the Present Danger: China, CPDC, was launched, showing a stance that it will absolutely not yield supremacy in high technology and military power.
The struggle for supremacy over technology transfer and military power, beginning with the trade war launched by President Trump, will inevitably become prolonged and permanent unless China returns in earnest to the path of reform and opening.
(One Pebble)