China, Unquarantined

Key Points

For decades, the United States has pursued a bipartisan strategy to engage China and enmesh it in the free world’s great webs of commerce, communications, travel, education, research, and culture.
While policymakers accurately assessed the upside for America from “engaging” China, they overlooked a whole dimension of downside—namely, dangers from integrating an unreformed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) into the US-led liberal world order.
The CCP remains fundamentally hostile to that liberal order, and thanks to engagement-abetted “globalization,” Beijing now can exploit domestic vulnerabilities in the US and other free societies, even as it corrupts institutions of liberal global governance.
The coronavirus pandemic underscores the catastrophic consequences of setting the CCP loose in the liberal international order—but many other unfamiliar new threats also lie in store, as we detail in this report.

Foreword

When news first broke that a mysterious illness was afflicting residents of Wuhan, China, it drew little attention in Washington. After all, China’s first SARS epidemic barely touched the US, and the conclusion of a Sino-American trade deal against the backdrop of an escalating geopolitical rivalry was dominating the headlines. But the wages of this oversight still lay beyond the imagining.

At this writing, worldwide SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) cases have topped 100 million, with more than two million recorded deaths. In the United States alone, the death toll is nearing 500,000, with COVID-19-related deaths currently averaging more than 3,000 per day. The global pandemic has devastated the world economy, destroyed public health systems, and inflicted untold misery across the planet.

As foreign policy analysts and scientists tried to understand how a local Chinese epidemic could fast become a planetary plague, we published “China Unquarantined” in National Review in June 2020¹ to catalogue the startling array of additional risks the US had unwittingly assumed because of decades of “engagement policy” with China—in effect, tying our national fortunes to those of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

As we explain, Xi Jinping’s empire of fear created the current global health catastrophe. The CCP turned a local epidemic into a global pandemic through its yin of repressive measures and yang of totalitarian error: cover-up, censorship, corruption of international institutions such as the World Health Organization, and more, detailed in our report.

The COVID-19 catastrophe provides a shocking lesson about the realities of China’s ailing political system—a system that many in the West believed to be a high-functioning, new model of “authoritarian capitalism.” But it is also an aperture into deep illnesses in the US-China relationship that have until now gone undiagnosed: the unintended consequences of “globalization with Chinese characteristics,” which Washington’s long-standing, bipartisan “engagement policy” has not only acquiesced in but also enthusiastically promoted.

For all its material benefits, the integration of an unreformed CCP into the US and global economies and our institutions of global governance poses immense and still poorly understood risks—to not only our own country but also open societies the world over. CCP influence extends increasingly into America’s commercial, cultural, and even political life. The CCP exerts growing “leverage from within” against other democracies too. There will be no full recovery until we treat this underlying political cancer.

President Joe Biden inherits the monumental challenge of leading the long march away from deadly entanglements with the CCP. Candidate Biden took a hard line against some of the CCP’s most odious behavior. But his administration will surely be tempted to accept Beijing’s forthcoming offers of better relations in exchange for illusory promises of cooperation on climate change and—of all things—public health. A “reset” with China will not address the concerns we outline. The CCP has spent decades building its leverage over the free world’s institutions and will not stop because the US has new a president. The old men who rule China depend for their survival on the success of the strategy we describe in this report.

Dan Blumenthal and Nicholas Eberstadt
February 2021

Read the full report.

Notes