The featured article on the Foreign Affairs website on Thanksgiving Day was by Wang Jisi, identified as “Founding President of the Institute of International Studies at Peking University.” The article is entitled “America and China Are Not Yet in a Cold War,” and Wang’s essay provides advice to America’s leaders and people on how to avoid a Cold War. Much of the article reads like many such essays in Foreign Affairs written by American and other Western writers, intellectuals, and policymakers: moderate in tone, seemingly fair-minded, thoughtful, prudent, and scholarly. Yet, tucked in the middle of Wang’s essay is a recommendation to U.S. and Taiwanese officials to encourage the “peaceful reunification” of Taiwan with China. Wang, you see, is also a member of the Foreign Policy Advisory Committee of China’s Foreign Ministry. He is, in other words, a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Wang decries the fact that the “two powers seem to be moving into an intensifying strategic competition that carries some features of the Cold War” but may even be more dangerous. China and the United States, he writes, both have their “hard-liners.” “Washington today sees its rival as an ideological foes,” Wang notes, and the “CCP holds high the banner of Marxism.” Wang acknowledges that the CCP “dominates China’s politics, economy, and society and does not allow any deviation that might challenge its authority.” And while Americans loathe communism, Chinese elites “view the United States as a sinister challenge to China’s internal political security and to the CCP’s authority.”
Wang writes that Beijing views itself as a “developing,” i.e., rising power, and views America as a declining power. And he points out that China “has achieved a rough military balance of power with Washington thanks to the growing Chinese nuclear arsenal.” The message here is that unlike in the 1950s and even as late as the 1990s, the United States no longer has the military supremacy, including nuclear supremacy, to deter or deny China’s forcible reunification with Taiwan. So, let China do peacefully what it otherwise will do militarily. Avoid both a Cold War and a hot war by abandoning Taiwan.
That stern message is camouflaged by Wang’s detentist semantics, where he urges America’s political and business leaders to ensure that the two nations’ “economies … remain intensively intertwined,” that both nations’ leaders to set up a “hotline between their operational military headquarters” and “hold discussions about reducing the potential risks posed by artificial intelligence,” “work together” on global health issues, and coordinate “climate change” policies. These are the moderate, prudent-sounding suggestions that serve to mask the real purpose of the article, which is to convince America’s leaders to avoid worsening bilateral relations over Taiwan. That, in the end, is the only way to avoid slipping into a Cold War and possibly a hot war, according to this CCP spokesperson.
Wang writes that we are in a different era despite similarities between the old Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union. The message to U.S. leaders here is that while you may have won the old Cold War, you will not win a new Cold War with China. China’s challenge is more multifaceted than the Soviet challenge. There are no Chinese Gorbachevs.
Wang’s article is for the CCP a timely follow-up to President Xi Jinping’s recent meeting with President Biden and Xi’s meeting with hundreds of America’s top business leaders in San Francisco. As the great political analyst James Burnham noted in his book The Machiavellians, political rhetoric, like Wang’s in his Foreign Affairs essay, must be viewed in the context of the real world time and place so that we can separate its “formal” meaning from its “real” meaning. China’s real world goal is not better relations with the United States; it is to achieve political control of Taiwan. Wang’s rhetoric about suggestions to improve relations must be viewed in the context of China’s increasingly militaristic approach to Taiwan and China’s growing nuclear arsenal. The real meaning of Wang’s article is: China as the rising power intends to control Taiwan and the United States as the declining power risks an intensifying Cold War and a catastrophic hot war if it stands in China’s way. Let us have Taiwan and you will have peace and your corporations will get wealthier. Foreign Affairs has inadvertently allowed us to see the mind of our enemy.
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