Will China be allowed to exercise a silent veto power over the actions of an entire presidential administration?
Will China be allowed to exercise a silent veto power over the actions of an entire presidential administration?
O n Joe Biden’s first day in office, the People’s Republic of China decided to settle scores individually with people who worked in the Trump administration by announcing that 28 members of the outgoing administration would be personally sanctioned for “crazy moves which have gravely interfered in China’s internal affairs,” primarily meaning that the Trump administration called out ongoing Chinese Communist Party human-rights abuses such as genocide, concentration camps, and slavery:
They include Michael R. Pompeo, Peter K. Navarro, Robert C. O’Brien, David R. Stilwell, Matthew Pottinger, Alex M. Azar II, Keith J. Krach, and Kelly D. K. Craft of the Trump administration as well as John R. Bolton and Stephen K. Bannon. These individuals and their immediate family members are prohibited from entering the mainland, Hong Kong and Macao of China. They and companies and institutions associated with them are also restricted from doing business with China.
Jimmy Quinn, National Review’s resident expert on the China beat, wrote that these sanctions are “largely symbolic” because most of these people are unlikely to travel to China in private life, and because members of Congress subject to similar sanctions “mostly took that as a badge of honor,” and they will, too. I’m not so sure we should be quite that sanguine. Biden will almost certainly do nothing for these people, guaranteeing that the next Republican administration will have little incentive to do anything for Biden officials who are personally targeted by the PRC. And despite early indications of the Biden team’s willingness to carry on some aspects of Trump’s confrontational stance against China, it is far from clear that there will be retaliation of a nature that would deter China from repeating this tactic in the future.
This points to a broader problem with U.S. foreign policy: We’ve reached a point of such personal bitterness between the parties that it is nearly impossible to conduct any sort of long-term strategy on anything, because all our adversaries have to do is drive wedges between the parties and wait out each new administration. Vladimir Putin has shown the possibilities of this tactic. So have the Iranian mullahs.
China has been quite explicit about what it is up to here. From an article in China’s state-run Global Times headlined “Sanctions on former cabinet members send powerful deterrent message”:
Washington’s “revolving door” is well-known — senior officials will be hired by companies, NGOs, or think tanks after they leave the government. China’s sanctions, like a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, will force those entities having businesses and cooperation with China to think twice whether they should develop relations with those former Trump administration officials. This is not the first time China has sanctioned US politicians. But it is the first time China imposed sanctions on the US side not as a tit-for-tat move. . . . China’s move this time should be a wake-up call for anti-China forces within the US, as well as China hawks within the new Biden administration. They should draw a lesson from their predecessors in the Trump administration.
From another Global Times article on the same topic, also emphasizing the deterrent effect aimed at the incoming administration:
Lü Xiang, an expert of US studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, told the Global Times . . . that in US politics, there was a revolving door for US politicians to be employed in private sector companies, financial institutes and think tanks after they leave office. The sanctions would seriously affect “the politicians’ road for gaining money,” Lü said. “For instance, like Stilwell on the sanction list, we met in Washington when he was going to retire from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2015,” Lü said. “At that time, the issues that most interested him were about doing business.”
Lü noted that with the deeply intertwined economic ties between the two countries, most major US companies, financial institutes and think tanks would unavoidably need to develop ties with China, making them reluctant to hire the sanctioned people. “This powerful sanction is also a warning to the officials who want to be the next Pompeo,” Lü said.
The vulnerability of Americans to foreign financial pressure is the point, and China’s reach can directly affect the behavior of American businesses:
It was true that some extreme anti-China activists on the list might not care about the sanctions as “anti-China” was what they did for a living, Lü said, but not all of them could do this for living all of the time. . . . Shen Yi, a professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Fudan University in Shanghai, told the Global Times [that f]or example, if a publisher wanted to give them a memoir or sell books to the Chinese market, that would be “impossible.”
Joe Biden’s own son and brother have made extensive money from business in China on Joe’s name and would doubtless like to keep doing so, but this goes well beyond the Biden family. If China can threaten to block White House staffers from publishing memoirs, and HHS leaders from employment by pharmaceutical companies (note the presence of Azar on the list), and State diplomats from working for think tanks, and everybody from being hired by global law firms and consulting firms, it can exercise an enormous, silent veto power over the actions of an entire presidential administration.
The initial response by the Biden administration was to issue a weak-tea pro forma denunciation:
“Imposing these sanctions on Inauguration Day is seemingly an attempt to play to partisan divides,” Biden’s National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne said in a statement to Reuters. “Americans of both parties should criticize this unproductive and cynical move. President Biden looks forward to working with leaders in both parties to position America to out-compete China,” Horne said.
The administration, or perhaps Congress, should step up and push back more vigorously. One short-term way to do this would be to guarantee financial compensation to any departing official of the U.S. government who is threatened by a foreign state with the loss of employment or business opportunities as a result of his or her conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Ideally, this could be rolled into broader reforms of some of the affirmative, corrupting ways that former government officials trade on the favor of foreign states after leaving office, not just disfavor. The revolving door is a bad thing. But so long as it exists, it should not be a national-security pressure point. And if “revolving door” extends as far as any former government official who wishes to make a living anywhere, it can never be eliminated.
The choice of targets, however, is shrewd: It would be politically agonizing for the Biden-Harris administration, newly in office at a time when the last president is on trial in the Senate for a riot at the Capitol, to provide any sort of compensation to Steve Bannon, of all people. Many Democrats want to impose their own permanent financial sanctions on departing Trump officials and have no desire to reward them. Shrewd also is calling their policies “crazy,” tracking as closely as possible the Democrats’ own rhetoric against Team Trump. Ditto the response to the Biden administration statement: “This U.S. politician is notorious for lying and cheating, is making himself a laughing stock and a clown.” Combined with glowing Chinese press coverage of the Biden transition, the effort to combine partisan carrots and sticks is not subtle.
Longer term, what this illustrates is the growing vulnerability of American independence to tactics by the Chinese government that are anything but hypothetical. We have seen, repeatedly, how American businesses that depend on Chinese revenue will kowtow to China when demanded, with the NBA and Hollywood as the most obviously craven examples. There may be no real end to this dynamic besides disengagement: reducing American exposure to the Chinese market so long as the current regime remains in power. That is a fateful step tied up with a battery of other issues: Chinese genocide against the Uyghurs, great-power rivalry in the South China Sea, Chinese concealment of the origins of COVID-19, Chinese intellectual property predation, and all the rest of the two nations’ many divisions.
In any event, letting this go without providing any sort of compensation to the affected officials, and without a stern deterrent against China’s repeating the tactic, will be an implicit concession that the Biden-Harris foreign-policy team will be cowed and compromised in dealing with China from the very start.