The current situation makes these Americans worry and fear.
Although the high-level contacts between China and the United States have gradually recovered since US President Joe Biden took office in 2021, the relationship between the two superpowers has not improved substantially. In Washington, D.C., how to contain China at all costs is still the biggest-even the only-main consensus between the ruling and opposition parties in the United States.
This also makes a group of American diplomatic experts feel both worried and scared: they are worried that this policy consensus will bite the United States itself, and they are afraid that telling the truth will be regarded as "betraying the country."
However, a female scholar from Cornell University in the United States decided to object to the consensus of the United States on China policy, even though she is half Chinese, which means that she can easily be labeled as a "traitor" at present.
The American New Yorker magazine recently interviewed this female scholar named Jessica ChenWeiss. Judging from this interview, one of the main reasons why Bai Jiexi stood up against the current US policy toward China is that this policy of "containing China at all costs" is eating back at the United States, so much so that her mother, a cancer doctor, said on the phone with her two years ago that the increasingly serious "anti-Asian" violence in American society has made her afraid to go out again.
This made Bai Jiexi, who grew up in the United States since childhood and never felt that there was anything wrong with her or her mother’s ethnic identity, feel "shocked".
So, according to The New Yorker, she decided to become a public intellectual, and began to express her views on American policy toward China in the media and public opinion field. She even once joined the the State Council team of Biden administration in the United States, hoping to promote policy changes there.
In an article published in American Foreign Affairs magazine in August this year, Bai Jiexi elaborated her views in detail in this article entitled "China Trap: American Foreign Policy and the Dangerous Logic of Zero-sum Competition".
If we try to generalize, her core point is that the United States should not be dominated by anxiety about China, and formulate its foreign policy narrowly around how to confront China. This not only lacks a pattern, but also will shake the leading position of the United States in the world, hurt American society and democracy, and will also lead to more intense and dangerous relations between China and the United States. After all, the more the United States does this, the more it will convince China that the United States is going to attack itself, so it will take more radical measures accordingly. But for fear of being labeled as "weak", both American officials and policy analysts are more concerned about how to be more "politically correct" in the face of China’s challenges. As a result, this has formed an "echo chamber effect" in the public opinion field. People not only fight hard against China for the purpose of protecting themselves or their career development, but also form a group thinking that excludes different voices.
She also called on the United States to have more contact and communication with China, and even thought that the US government should not encourage senior officials to flee to Taiwan, nor should it upgrade the level of US relations with Taiwan.
However, although Bai Jiexi, who dared to express these views, was praised as "very brave" by some like-minded American diplomatic scholars and experts, she had to present her views carefully. In that August article in Foreign Affairs magazine, she took out a long section specifically listing what China did "wrong" in the eyes of the United States, which covered everything from Xinjiang to Taiwan Province, although this listing was more like a kind of "political correctness" or "political life-saving".
In the interview with the New Yorker, the reporter of the magazine also mentioned many times that she should always be "careful" and "cautious" when expressing her views, and try to speak only from the perspective of facts and policies. This is because other Asian Americans who are equally dissatisfied with the current US policy toward China have been attacked by racism for expressing their opposition. She even had to limit her use of social media, because she saw that other Asian Americans who spoke on social media had been labeled as "disloyal to the United States."
According to The New Yorker, scholars like Bai Jiexi belong to a new group in the circle of Sino-US relations in the United States. This group is called "Competitive Coexisters". They admit that Sino-US relations are competitive, but they also think that the two countries should find ways to coexist peacefully, and the United States should keep in touch with China more often.
There are three other groups in this circle. One is the "Engagers" composed of those who encouraged contacts with China from the 1970s to 2010. However, in the increasingly extreme environment of the current US policy toward China, the reputation of these people has been tarnished, because one of the ideas that dominated the US policy toward China in the past few years is that contacts with China have "failed" and led the wolf into the room; The other group is the "new cold war faction" who has long believed that the United States should be tough on China; The third group is the "strategic competitors". These people think that China wants to "replace" the United States, so the United States must contain China through competition.
According to The New Yorker, it is Kurt Campbell, Ely Ratner and Rush Doshi who are in charge of China and the so-called Indo-Pacific strategy that dominate Biden’s administration. This is why the Biden administration did not cancel some radical policies towards China adopted by former President Trump, as some analysts hoped, and even sent wrong signals on the Taiwan Province issue many times.
Therefore, although the "competitive coexistence faction" between China and the United States like Bai Jiexi has seen the big problem of the current narrow China policy of the United States, it is probably difficult for them to change this situation in a short time. And after 2024, who knows where the United States will go?
Finally, it is worth mentioning that the idea of "competition and coexistence" between China and the United States put forward by Bai Jie Sunrise is actually quite consistent with the idea that China and the United States should build a "new-type relationship between major powers" with mutual respect and mutual benefit many years ago. However, what the United States has done in recent years has turned its back on this idea. On the contrary, China, which has been slandered by the United States as "turning its back" on the road of peaceful rise, has always shown the proper measure of a responsible big country in the face of the constant and dangerous provocation of the United States in many fields and territorial sovereignty issues.
So, as Bai Jie Sunrise is worried, if the United States continues to make trouble like this, who wants such a country to lead the world?
(Source: Global Times)
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