Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: The U.S. Congress considers a series of bills targeting China as lawmakers return from summer recess, former Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang resurfaces in a minor position, and China dominates the medal table at the Paralympics.
Sign up to receive China Brief in your inbox every Tuesday.
Sign up to receive China Brief in your inbox every Tuesday.
China Week Begins in Washington
The U.S. Congress has embarked on a so-called China week, with a series of bills scheduled for a vote as lawmakers return from their summer recess. Technology is the focus of many of the proposed measures, reflecting a growing consensus in Washington about the state of U.S.-China competition.
The war over semiconductor manufacturing is still raging, but the legislation that has already passed—or is likely to—aims to limit Chinese access and cooperation in wider-ranging fields, such as biotechnology and drones.
It’s relatively easy to find bipartisan support for such bills, especially those that focus on blocking off China rather than funding new U.S. initiatives. In a city as full of lobbyists as Washington is, it matters that these measures might hurt some firms, but they gain fulsome support from others that stand to win when their Chinese competitors lose out on U.S. markets.
The focus on cutting off Chinese firms rather than supporting domestic innovation may leave Americans struggling to find replacement products, which has happened in the states that banned Chinese drones. Furthermore, Beijing is very interested in trying to win the scientific future, but it’s not neglecting other forms of power on the ground—from naval expansionism to diplomacy and investment in areas often left behind by the United States.
There are a few proposed measures that go beyond tech, such as efforts to solidify Taiwan’s defense; review Hong Kong’s Economic and Trade Offices in the United States; and target Confucius Institutes, which are Beijing-run educational centers at universities worldwide. (There are fewer than a dozen such institutes left in the United States, although many of those that have closed have effectively reopened under new names.)
There are also bills that represent anti-China paranoia, such as one that would make agreements with the World Health Organization (WHO) subject to Senate confirmation with two-thirds approval—a virtual impossibility that has prevented the United States from formally ratifying international treaties in the past. The rationale for the bill is China’s supposedly undue influence over the WHO, but the measure would undercut most U.S. cooperation with the organization.
It’s also out of date: Although China’s influence in the WHO undoubtedly caused issues at the start of 2020, such as delaying the formal declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, the body has increasingly called out China’s own lack of cooperation.
That bill looks unlikely to get anywhere. More threatening may be an attempt to revive the discredited “China Initiative” through language related to a key spending bill. The China Initiative, a program created under former U.S. President Donald Trump that overwhelmingly targeted ethnic Chinese scientists in the United States (often on flimsy evidence), produced dozens of failed or dropped prosecutions that forced some scientists to return to China.
What will Beijing make of China week? Chinese officials often take a dim view of Congress. U.S. representatives, less burdened by diplomatic need than others in Washington, are fond of rhetorical declarations targeting Chinese human rights abuses and political gestures toward Taiwan. The Chinese Embassy in Washington has already used its favorite epithet, “McCarthyism,” to describe the legislation aimed at Beijing.
However, China’s political leadership often fails to distinguish one part of the U.S. government from another, tending to see intergovernmental clashes and even partisan ones as a façade over deeper forces of class, race, or capital. For example—judging by their past behavior—it’s hard to convince Chinese officials that the U.S. president can’t veto a congressional trip to Taiwan.
It doesn’t help that China policy is one of the few remaining areas in Washington where there are genuine bipartisan efforts—and where U.S. President Joe Biden has effectively continued Trump’s approach. China week, then, is likely to reinforce the view in Beijing that the U.S. presidential election in November is relatively unimportant—that whoever wins, it won’t substantially change things for China.
What We’re Following
Qin Gang’s new job. Former Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang, who disappeared from public view in July 2023, has reappeared in minor post at the World Affairs Press, a translation and publication house run by the Foreign Affairs Ministry.
The news counters wild rumors that Qin died or was executed and supports the prevailing theory that his fall was due to his alleged affair with a newscaster. A more serious failure—such as Qin being compromised by foreign powers—would have led to a more dire fate.
In his demotion, Qin joins fellow so-called wolf warrior Zhao Lijian, an aggressive former Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson who was relegated to an unimportant border post last year. But their new positions seem to reflect the insecurity of officials under Chinese President Xi Jinping—who has purged hundreds of top-level officials—rather than a renunciation of ultranationalism.
The careers of other wolf-warrior diplomats, such as Ambassador to France Lu Shaye, remain unaffected; meanwhile, nationalist tabloid boss Hu Xijin was silenced recently for daring to suggest that China needed economic reform.
China reigns supreme at Paralympics. The Paralympic Games wrapped up in Paris this week and—as has been the case since 2004—China dominated the medal table. This is the result of enormous state sports funding for the Olympics, as well as the country’s sheer size. But while the Paralympics have brought important visibility to disabled people in China, the lives of most remain extremely limited, with disabled individuals often earning significantly lower incomes and facing obstacles to finding employment in the first place.
The 2008 Paralympic Games in Beijing saw minor improvements to disability access, with ramps added to a few prominent tourist sites, such as one section of the Great Wall. Yet most of the changes were minimal: Beijing’s roughly 70,000 taxis, for example, were joined by a fleet of just 30 vehicles designed for wheelchair accessibility; as of 2020, the accessibility situation had not noticeably improved.
Tech and Business
Football fiasco. Even as it triumphs at the Olympics and Paralympics, China remains oddly hapless at team sports. Japan crushed the Chinese national team on the soccer field last Thursday, winning by 7-0 in a World Cup qualifying match. Chinese fans have bemoaned the sense of national humiliation in the wake of the game; sports and a sense of national strength have been bound together for decades in China.
Corruption is often blamed for China’s soccer failings, but yet another crackdown this year—which led to led to 43 lifetime bans this week—has done little to improve things. Football, Xi’s favorite sport, has become a heavy-handed metaphor for the failings of his approach to fighting corruption. Repeated crackdowns by the Chinese Communist Party have done little to effect change, likely due to the lack of outside oversight or free speech.
Cloud seeding blamed for storm. Clothes dryers are rare in China, and most people still hang their laundry on the balcony—which led to a rain of underwear in the megacity of Chongqing this week during an unexpected windstorm. Sudden hurricane-speed gusts left people with no time to bring the laundry in, leaving garments hurtling through the skies and dubbed the “9/2 Chongqing underwear crisis.”
Chongqing residents, largely amused if also annoyed, have blamed the sudden gusts on cloud seeding used to break a 12-day heat wave, which authorities have denied. Cloud seeding is an increasingly common Chinese weather manipulation technique, where particles of salt or silver iodide are scattered into the clouds to alter rain patterns. As China faces increasingly extreme weather, such measures are becoming routine in the summer.
FP’s Most Read This Week
A Bit of Culture
Although disability was often stigmatized in premodern China, Daoist philosophers such as Zhuangzi (late 4th century B.C.) took a different approach. Chapter 5 of the eponymous text Zhuangzi, “Signs of Virtue at Its Fullest,” includes a cast of outcasts who, although deformed by birth or disfigured through criminal punishment, turn out to be unexpected paragons of virtue.—Brendan O’Kane, translator
Excerpt from “Signs of Virtue at Its Fullest”By Zhuangzi
No-Toes Shushan, a mutilated convict from Lu, plodded on his heels to visit Confucius.“It was your own carelessness that made you end up like this,” Confucius said. “What use is there in coming to see me now?”
“I lost my feet because I was heedless of my duties and careless of my body,” No-Toes said. “I’m here now because I still possess something worth more than my feet, and I am trying to keep it whole. ‘Heaven covers everything, and Earth bears all things up.’ I thought you were like Heaven and Earth, sir—I never imagined you’d be like this!”
“That was low of me,” Confucius said. “Please, won’t you come in? I have much to learn from you.” But No-Toes left.
“Take note of his example, disciples!” the master said. “The man is a convict who had the front halves of his feet cut off for his crime—and even so, he dedicates himself to learning, in hopes of making up for the wickedness he once practiced. How much more so should those of us whose virtue remains whole!”
No-Toes told Laozi what had happened. “That Confucius—he’s still a long way from perfection, isn’t he? Why does he keep trying to imitate you? He’s trying to make a name for himself with his odd notions and outlandish doctrines—doesn’t he know that a perfected man sees fame and reputation as the fetters and shackles they are?”
Laozi said: “Why not get him to regard death and life as a single strand, and to see ‘permissible’ and ‘impermissible’ as strung on a single thread? Would that free him from his fetters?”
“Heaven is hobbling him,” No-Toes said. “How could he ever be freed?”
The post Back From Recess, U.S. Congress Targets China appeared first on Foreign Policy.
