BIG IDEA | ‘Biden’s emerging China strategy, while still protean, sounds of a kind with Mr Doshi’s prescription for “blunting and building”.’

‘America must focus on “blunting Chinese power and order and building the foundations for US power and order”.’

• ‘This from “The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order,” by Rush Doshi, China Director at National Security Council.
• ‘The book also argues that China has worked for years to undermine America’s geopolitical dominance and shape a more illiberal world order that better protects and serves China’s interests.’
• ‘It concludes that these efforts need to be repaid in kind.’

‘This is a striking rebuke to decades of American foreign-policy thinking focused on “engagement” with China.’

• ‘Many hoped that Mr Biden would bring some order to the chaos and lay down rules for a return to some sort of engagement, albeit on less friendly terms than those practised by the Obama administration in which he served.’
• ‘But although Mr Biden’s administration is indeed forgoing the caprice and wilfulness of his predecessor, in other respects it is toughening policy,’ assiduously building a strategic framework for countering and checking China’s rise.’

‘Unlike Mr Trump, Mr Biden seems sincerely worried about a world in which China’s authoritarian model wins.’

• ‘That makes him more serious about the policies implemented, often haphazardly, by the hawks who served in the previous administration.’

‘In its first six months Mr Biden’s administration has, to the surprise of many, officially affirmed the label of “genocide” applied by the last administration to atrocities in Xinjiang, and also worked with allies to impose further sanctions on the perpetrators.’

• ‘It has kept in place and refined Mr Trump’s prohibitions on doing business with Huawei and a long list of technology companies and military-affiliated businesses.’
• ‘It has made countering China a priority in talks with allies around the world, and shown no urgency to hold a summit with Xi Jinping, China’s president.’

‘Mr Biden is positioning America as the West’s leader in a “contest with autocrats”, as he put it at the G7 summit in June.’

• ‘In an interview with The Economist a senior administration official said China sees the next 10 to 15 years as a window of opportunity in which to “assert its authority globally”: continuing its attempts to dominate critical technologies and rewrite the rules of the global order, and cowing its critics so as to make the world safe for autocracy.’

‘This is not a secret.’

• ‘Mr Xi has outlined China’s ambitions to exert influence on the global order, seizing a moment when the Communist Party views the West to be in decline.’

‘Even so, people in the West, the official said, are only beginning to recognise “that we’re dealing with a country that is perhaps less interested in coexistence, and more interested in dominance”.’

• ‘The time to take a stand, therefore, is now.’

‘The emerging strategy, while still protean, sounds of a kind with Mr Doshi’s prescription for “blunting and building”.