China Doesn’t Compartmentalize

The Biden administration has always tried—and mostly failed—to win Beijing’s support for what it believes should be natural areas of cooperation. From his first year in office, U.S. President Joe Biden sought to render climate change an engine for U.S-China cooperation. But two years of unilateral U.S. pleas bore few results. Despite multiple visits and statements by U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, Beijing explicitly responded that the issue cannot be separated from broader U.S.-China relations.

More recently, as fentanyl increasingly became a social problem for the United States, Washington made it clear that it hoped for Beijing’s assistance on combatting drugs. Both efforts were an expression of Biden’s policy of “compartmentalization”: the idea that cooperation on certain issues can be separated from the U.S.-China competition because it is in the interest of both parties to do so.

But compartmentalization with China has proved a failure—and a report last month in the Wall Street Journal seemed to signal its death knell. The newspaper reported that the Biden administration is considering lifting sanctions on a police forensics lab accused of human rights violations in Xinjiang province in return for Beijing cracking down on fentanyl. This marks an embarrassing policy reversal for the Biden administration—but an entirely unsurprising one.

On the surface, compartmentalization sounds tenable, especially when it comes to seemingly apolitical issues such as climate change or global health. After all, there seems to be little reason to disagree. COVID-19 clearly demonstrated that it’s not enough to just keep your own citizens safe from epidemics—global collaboration is essential in this interconnected world. The global commons need to be sustained in one way or another. Why don’t the great powers cooperate on these issues, even as they compete geopolitically?

But compartmentalization with China is fundamentally futile as long as Beijing continues to engage in what it has referred to as “unrestricted warfare,” which goes beyond the conventional realm of conflict and peace. The term was first coined in 1996 by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, two colonels in the People’s Liberation Army, and is a concept that envisions how China can defeat a technologically superior adversary through a variety of means that transcend the traditional military domain. Methods encompassing but not limited to cyber warfare, economic warfare, and media infiltration are exploited to overcome military disadvantage. An report this month by the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted China’s “aggressive and unprecedented political warfare campaign” encompassing espionage, offensive cyber operations, social media disinformation, economic coercion, and irregular military action. All these disparate measures are intertwined and geared towards a unified objective: undermining both the capacity and the will of the United States to contend with China.

But China’s inclination for unrestricted warfare is not just a product of its unique ambition to reinstate a Sino-centric global system. It is also the result of the international system’s structure.

China is a challenger, not an existing hegemon, in an unprecedentedly interconnected world. Granted, China’s gigantic state power nearly rivals the United States’. Its economy is expected to surpass the U.S. economy in the next few decades. Beijing is proactively expanding its partnerships, working with both authoritarian and democratic states. However, it lacks the global legitimacy, network of alliances, and the military capacity to displace the United States. China still faces the Malacca Dilemma, two decades after then-Chinese President Hu Jintao lamented it in 2003: The Chinese economy relies on a strategic waterway (the Strait of Malacca) that it does not control. Most importantly, China has no concrete sphere of influence that it can stand on to claim primacy or use as a springboard for global hegemony. China is no hegemon, for now.

This seemingly disadvantageous condition as a challenger presents a major benefit to China, one that renders compartmentalization unrealistic: it allows Beijing to free ride on the world’s existing hegemon to remedy shared problems.

China has shown a seemingly puzzling tendency to portray itself as either a global superpower or a developing country, depending on the context. When it comes to mediating peace in the Middle East or demanding a “new type of great power relations” with the United States, China positions itself as a great power. At international conferences discussing carbon emissions, however, China positions itself as a developing state that should not be stunting industrialization. The futility of compartmentalization is intertwined with the Kindleberger Trap—“the under-provision of global public goods” during a hegemonic transition, in the absence of a clear leader. China hoped to geopolitically exploit the Obama administration’s eagerness for the Paris Climate Accords, to no avail. When the Trump administration exited the agreement, China continued with its own lackluster brake on carbon emissions. Beijing can do this because the reputational responsibility still largely falls to the United States, the existing hegemon.

Even when China does seemingly work on a global scale, it is rarely out of a sense of a great power duty. Beijing’s global provision of masks and vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic was carefully tailored to maximally expand its influence. In Europe, China’s mask diplomacy sought to divide the European Union; Beijing coined the phrase “Health Silk Road” to add a geopolitical touch to vaccine provision. And despite being the largest global donor of vaccines by far, the United States was hardly lauded—rather, its clumsy response was criticized universally—because the international community took for granted the U.S. role as the provider of shared global goods.

Similarly, China’s recent bids to mediate peace between conflicting parties are not intended to protect the rules-based order. To the contrary, in Chinese thinkers’ own words, they provide Beijing a “golden opportunity to shape new international norms” and promote Chinese initiatives such as the “community with a shared destiny for mankind,” Global Security Initiative, Global Development Initiative, and Global Civilization Initiative. At the heart of these slogans is China’s ambition to establish hierarchical regional hegemony and exercise autocratic global leadership.

But it’s not just China’s structural role as a challenger that undermines the Biden administration’s compartmentalization strategy. It’s also the philosophy of hegemony that China has cultivated for itself.

Chinese discourse on the so-called “China Century” revolves around the idea that returning China to its “rightful place” is a matter of historical destiny. China, in other words, seeks to restore global supremacy primarily out of a sense of historical fulfillment, rather than for material gains. In Beijing’s view, a world dominated by China but disrupted by chaos and conflicts is still preferable to the existing, lopsided, West-dominated order. Xi has openly expressed his intent to drag his people through times of struggle and hardship, en route to the ultimate dialectical victory of “Chinese-style socialism.” There is little reason to believe he would be more sympathetic for the rest of the world in China’s journey to supremacy.

Even when it comes to the international economy, where win-win cooperation is traditionally considered the optimal result, China has a different idea. The Chinese effort to lead the advanced technology industry, represented by the now-flailing Made in China 2025 initiative, is at least partly driven by the desire to dominate the global economy—regardless of its implications for the world. The emergence of China’s electric vehicle industry is “just one example of a trend toward a China-centric integrated regional economy in Asia,” the Christopher Vassallo wrote recently in The Diplomat.

Even in the semiconductor industry, whereby complete decoupling is considered unrealistic for both the West and China, Beijing seeks to maximally absorb Western technology and minimize outflow of its own know-hows. Former Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s belief that “the U.S. role in the future global economy would be to provide China with raw materials, agricultural products, and energy to fuel its production of the world’s cutting-edge industrial and consumer products” is not an aberration. In practice, consigning the most modern economy in the world to such a role would be counterproductive for the world and China—but that cost is secondary to the realization of China’s global ambitions.

This starkly contrasts with the United States’ own experience. The United States stepped up as the leader of the free world because American statesmen saw it as necessary to stay on the global stage to prevent another world war, not because they believed global hegemony was their fate. U.S. involvement in international affairs did not begin as an end in itself. American leaders defied their centuries-long instinct and tradition for a clear strategic purpose that went beyond status aspirations. China is profoundly different. If the Truman Doctrine was the United States’ grudging response to impending Soviet domination, Xi’s Global Security Initiative is a vision brought about by China’s independent desires.

Hence, unlike the postwar United States, China would willingly embrace a less prosperous, less stable, and less predictable world—as long as it retains the top seat. It would be a mistake to assume that China fears what the United States fears, and that the two countries can cooperate on all issues that harm mutual interests. Displacing the United States, first from China’s neighborhood and then from the global stage, remains Beijing’s top priority. Instability in the process is a negligible cost, especially when the other side is much more desperate for cooperation.

Compare this quandary with the uneasy—and often overlooked—superpower partnership between the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold War. Strict bipolarity, whereby Moscow held ownership over a significant portion of the international system, enabled the two rivals to cooperate on some critical issues.

Despite intense rivalry with occasional thaws, the two superpowers maintained a surprisingly close partnership when it came to managing global issues. For example, the White House easily won support from the Kremlin in constructing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime. It was U.S. allies such as France and Canada, not the Soviet Union, that often posed problems in ensuring nuclear weapons did not proliferate further. In 1977, the Soviets discovered a clandestine South African nuclear program, shared the intelligence with the United States and its allies, and “implored them to intervene.”

The United States and the USSR also implicitly understood the need to restrain their respective allies. Then-U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower pressured his Western allies into withdrawing from Suez Canal in 1956, in a remarkably forceful fashion that risked weakening crucial ties. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev used his leverage over Soviet troops in East Germany to preclude East German leader Walter Ulbricht’s unapproved attack on East Berlin. The United States and the Soviet Union restrained their respective Korean clients to ensure that a second Korean war did not break out. Even the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, a prime example of alliance entanglement, de-escalated through the Soviet Union’s refusal of Cuban and Chinese demands for intransigence. This awkward yet enduring symbiosis was summarized in then-Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev’s private conversation with then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1973, where the former noted: “Look, I want to talk to you privately—nobody else, no notes. You will be our partners; you and we are going to run the world.”

In essence, the USSR had some sense of ownership because it was one of the co-owners of the international system. For the Soviets, global bipolarity translated into a sense of responsibility; Soviet prestige now hinged on maintaining stability in the Eastern Bloc, for which the broader international system had to remain fairly predictable. This rationale incentivized two rounds of détente. Even the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which killed off the first détente, was the result of the Kremlin’s miscalculation that the country was peripheral to the international system.

China does not share the same urge to maintain global stability, because it is a challenger—not an established hegemon. Intransigence on climate change and narcotics are just two examples of an apparent pattern. China’s relationships with its allies are even more telling. Denuclearization of North Korea has long remained on Washington’s list of potential areas of cooperation between the United States. and China. However, China uses North Korea as a pawn, doing little to denuclearize the reclusive regime. It provides diplomatic cover and economic assistance for the North Korean nuclear weapons program. It seeks to remove U.S. troops stationed in South Korea and weaken the U.S.-South Korea alliance by using North Korea as a bargaining chip.

China also maintains a strong partnership with Russia. It has not gone so far as to sponsor Russia’s war in Ukraine. However, even this measured approach is intended to ensure that Europe does not fully align with the United States in the so-called New Cold War. Beijing’s charm offensive is intended to drive a wedge between the transatlantic allies. Moreover, should Russia get cornered to the brink of a defeat, China is highly likely to intervene to ensure its most crucial Eurasian ally does not collapse. With China’s own aspirations regarding Taiwan, Beijing can hardly be against Moscow’s historical revanchism.

None of this is to argue that the United States should grant China a sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific to turn Beijing into a more responsible stakeholder. This would entail abandoning Washington’s most steadfast allies and handing over the most geo-economically important region in the world. Millions of people would find their way of life undermined by habitual Chinese interferences, if not outright meddling. U.S. credibility would be totally devastated, incentivizing other revisionist powers to stir problems elsewhere. A China that controls the Indo-Pacific is also likely to eventually vie for global hegemony, just as the United States’ own expedition for international leadership began with dominating its neighborhood.

To the contrary, this finding empowers the notion that the U.S. response to China’s all-out competition should be equally sweeping, cross-departmental, and whole-of-nation. The United States should also exploit the asymmetric advantage of alliances. Expending assets and capital for areas of cooperation that are unlikely to bear fruit is wasteful. Washington should muster a grand strategy that can comprehensively deal with Beijing’s challenge, acknowledging that compartmentalization doesn’t work. The myriad of euphemisms such as “cooperative competition” and “healthy competition” may be useful in signaling harmless intent, but do not reflect reality. Within the broader context of extreme competition, compartmentalization is a hope, not a strategy.

This is also not to argue that Washington should give up on cooperating with Beijing where it can. Indeed, domains of collaboration exist where China already feels an independent, urgent, and significant need to address its own problems. For example, China has consistently, proactively cooperated with the West on counterterrorism because it faces its own issues in its western regions. China could also become more cooperative on climate change in the future, once it starts seriously affecting economic growth. However, the United States should not fall for any traps by granting concessions elsewhere to elicit cooperation.

The idea of compartmentalization is contingent on “strategic hubris”—the assumption that the other side assumes, thinks, and behaves like you. This assumption can’t be more wrong when facing an opponent, like China, with a cost-benefit calculus completely different from one’s own.