News: The dance of democracies, from China Watcher of the week, Robin Shepherd

Thursday, February 18, 2021

The dance of democracies, from China Watcher of the week, Robin Shepherd

Feb 18, 2021

Good morning and welcome to a guest-hosted China Watcher! With our original watcher, David Wertime, moving over to our sister site Protocol, we'll be introducing you to a few guest writers over the following weeks that we hope will bring some new perspectives on the Beijing-Washington relationship, and the power centers in between. Allow me to introduce your first guest host: Robin Shepherd, former journalist and vice president of HFX (which runs the annual Halifax International Security Forum) and author of China vs. Democracy: The Greatest Game. Take it away, Robin. — Ben Pauker, world and national security editor, POLITICO

Talking to the Biden whisperer: Few members of Congress are better informed about the Biden administration's approach to foreign policy and the evolving strategy on China than Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who took a leading role in Biden's election campaign, and has held the president's old seat in Delaware since 2010.

With the Senate's balance of power having shifted to Democrats, Coons has already assumed chairmanship of some highly influential subcommittees. In an exclusive interview with China Watcher on Tuesday, Coons said he fully intends to use his new roles to push back against Beijing's encroachments in the United States, and against democracies everywhere.

A new conference for democracies: One of President Joe Biden's flagship foreign policy projects is a U.S.-led conference for democracies, at which, Coons said, the issue of dealing with China will be front and center.

At a town hall in Milwaukee on Wednesday, Biden said that China should expect to face "repercussions" for its oppressive treatment of the Uighurs. Speaking with Chinese leader Xi Jinping last week (for two hours!), he stressed the need for sustaining a free and open Indo-Pacific and flagged concerns about Beijing's increasingly aggressive stance on Hong Kong and Taiwan. China's interference in American and other democracies as well as unfair trade practices are also high among the administration's complaints.

As if all that were not enough, there are reports that the White House and the State Department are discussing the formation of an alliance of "techno democracies" to counter China's plans to dominate the digital revolution in the 21st century.

So there will be no shortage of items to put on the conference's agenda.

Reports suggest the big democracy summit will take place toward the end of the year. "Planning for this conference is already well underway," Coons said, adding that he had discussed it with Secretary of State Antony Blinken as well as other high-ranking members of the administration.

— Those in glass houses… Beijing, of course, will pour scorn on the idea, gleefully pointing to the shortcomings and injustices that continue to plague American democracy, particularly the storming of Congress on January 6.

Coons, arguably the most important "individual Democrat on Capitol Hill" was crystal clear that it was right in itself to address those shortcomings, but also a matter of crucial significance in winning the battle of ideas against authoritarian states around the world. "We have to get busy in repairing the breach not just in our Capitol building but in our democracy," he told China Watcher, adding, "China is aggressively making the case that their model of governance is better than ours. ... Ahead of this conference, I hope we will put in the hard work of investing in our democracy."

An anxious world, shaken by the events of January 6, needs America to put its house in order sooner rather than later. If 2021 can culminate in a historic conference of democracies led by a rejuvenated United States, the world will be well on its way to providing the pushback against Beijing that it so richly deserves.

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BIDEN'S TEAM IN FLURRY OF DIPLOMATIC ACTIVITY: The democracy conference is likely to be raised at Friday's virtual G7 heads of government meeting that Biden has already signaled will be dominated by discussion of Covid-19, climate change and China.

The president is also scheduled to speak at the Munich Security Conference on the same day.

On the other side of the weekend, diplomatic sources told Politico that Blinken had been invited to speak Monday by video conference to European Union foreign ministers. With China high on the agenda, that meeting could be the first to highlight that pulling together America's allies in a united front against Beijing might be easier said than done.

Europe isn't looking for a fight, however. The EU itself has recently signed a controversial investment deal with China. It would be an extraordinarily bold move should Blinken ask European foreign ministers for a rethink, and one unlikely to yield success.

After the departure of the U.K. from the EU in 2020, Berlin and Paris may again be the bloc's undisputed leaders, but it is far from clear they are interested in antagonizing Beijing. French President Emmanuel Macron, in particular, has no obvious appetite for a confrontation, recently saying: "A situation to join all together against China, this is a scenario of the highest possible conflictuality. This one, for me, is counterproductive."

Italy, the EU's third-largest economy and a member of the G7, signed a Memorandum of Understanding to join China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2019, following Greece's lead the year before.

Hungary, which became the first EU country to lose its Freedom House ranking as a fully fledged democracy in 2019, is effectively pro-Beijing. The country's populist leader Viktor Orban is hardly likely to take a tough stance on Chinese opposition to liberal-democratic values that he and his government also openly oppose.

My take: The idea of a conference of democracies is noble and necessary. HFX has been running them for years. But the president and his secretary of State may very shortly be about to learn just how difficult they are to pull off, and why previous such plans have quickly come to nothing.

A tech update from Protocol | China. Protocol | China, backed by Robert Allbritton, publisher of Protocol and POLITICO, tracks the intersection of technology and policy in the world's largest country. Sign up for the newsletter and learn more about Protocol's research here. This week's coverage includes major Chinese IPOs to watch in 2020 and how livestreaming ecommerce took center stage at the Lunar New Year Gala, a state-backed event that draws (far) more viewers than the Super Bowl.

TRANSLATING WASHINGTON

Bipartisan pushback against Beijing in the Senate. Back in the U.S. Senate, in his new role as chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, Coons told your host that partners abroad should "get on the same page" regarding China's "digital authoritarianism," a matter he said he regarded with the utmost concern.

Last Friday, Coons was also named chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations (SFOPS). With a $55 billion budget, the position gives Coons a formidable platform to help reinvigorate American leadership, something he said he was confident he would be able to get bipartisan buy-in for. "Even in the past week [during the Senate impeachment hearings] I had encouraging conversations with Republican senators," he told POLITICO.

A former senior Trump administration official told CW that many in his party are willing to work with Democrats on China. "I think there will be a high degree of cooperation from Republicans so long as the Biden administration maintains a very tough approach to China. There's certainly bipartisan support for enlisting our allies into a united front to counter CCP aggression and malign influence worldwide."

— Heat rises on Beijing Winter Olympics 2022 . After Republican lawmakers proposed earlier in February to move the 2022 Winter Olympics out of Beijing to protest "genocide" of the ethnic Uighurs, a new front has now opened that may yet cause divisions inside the United States and among its allies.

So far, the Biden administration has resisted calls for a boycott.

Democrats aren't ready to sign on: A leading Democrat on Capitol Hill told your host on Wednesday that, in tandem with the White House, most Democrats were not yet ready to join their Republican counterparts in pushing to move the 2022 Winter Olympics from China.

Interestingly though, he raised the prospect that Congress might move in that direction, playing bad cop to the White House's good cop on the matter, thus sewing confusion in Chinese leaders' minds. That, the source said, might provide political leverage on Chinese human rights issues without necessarily leading to a boycott.

Slippery slopes ahead: Britain's Guardian newspaper reported this month that, "More than 180 human rights organizations have called for a boycott of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games in protest against China's mass human rights abuses." The groups, the Guardian noted, are "primarily regional associations in support of Tibet, Taiwan, the Uighur community and Hong Kong."

There are moves afoot in other democracies, too. Up in Canada, Conservative leader of the opposition Erin O'Toole earlier this week publicly called for the 2022 Winter Games to be moved out of China in protest at what O'Toole described as "a genocide" against the Uighurs.

The government of Justin Trudeau has so far not gone so far as to call for the Games' relocation, but the prime minister revealed that the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Committees were "looking very closely" at the issue.

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Push for Black China ambassador: Calls are increasing for Biden to name an African American as the next U.S. ambassador to China, reports China Watcher contributor Shirley Martey Hargis.

"I think it's about time," Mark Akpaninyie, co-founder of the Black China Caucus, told Hargis this week. "Many of our previous ambassadors hadn't spent much time in China and didn't even speak the language besides knowing 'ni hao.' There are a lot of black people that have China experience, speak Mandarin, yet that experience has never been a true prerequisite."

Last month, CW embraced the idea of Biden appointing an African American to head the Beijing mission after Bryce C. Barros , an analyst with the German Marshall Fund, floated the idea in Foreign Policy.

"Appointing Black ambassadors to America's greatest adversaries will align the United States' strategic advantage of diversity and pose an ideological and material challenge to China as well as other adversaries," Barros argued.

A name often mentioned is that of retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Charles Hooper. But alas, reports out Wednesday indicate that Biden may have other strategic considerations in mind. Bloomberg reported that Rahm Emanuel and Nicholas Burns are viewed as leading candidates for the post because the administration wants someone with deep political ties or diplomatic experience.

Akpaninyie is undeterred. Especially, he said, because of the strong signal an African American would send to the people of China, where a form of anti-black racism operates fluidly. Just last week at the televised New Year Gala, dancers in blackface were depicted portraying Africans. It all comes as China invests billions in African and Caribbean countries.

"A Black ambassador helps the U.S. elevate the conversation to Black people that we're going to be able to advance the conversation to our allies, partners and other stakeholders abroad that Americans aren't just white and that our identity is multifaceted," he said. "This choice signals our value to the world after everyone witnessed people brandishing nooses, swastikas and Confederate flags storm the Capitol."

Akpaninyie said having a Black ambassador in China also could send a message on human rights, particularly as China comes under criticism for its treatment of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang.

"China can use issues of police brutality and the picture of discrimination to distract and gaslight about any reasonable conversation about human rights abuses and Xinjiang. That gaslighting has less credibility when you have a Black person," he told Hargis. "We can advocate for inclusive values and stand up for everyone globally."

Thanks to: Editor John Yearwood, Benjamin Pauker, Blake Hounshell, Luiza Ch. Savage, Matt Kaminski and Shirley Martey Hargis.

Do you have tips? Chinese-language stories we might have missed? Would you like to contribute to China Watcher? Email chinawatcher at politico dot com.

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