The Far Left’s Curious Anti-Anti-China Campaign

T he hawkish turn in American China policy has left no political faction in the cold more than progressives with a Pollyannaish attitude toward the Chinese Communist Party’s malign behavior. So while lawmakers of both parties and the Biden administration offer tough new measures to combat Beijing’s worrying actions, fringe-left groups have begun promoting a much different perspective in a letter-writing campaign that, until last week, had largely flown under the radar.

The coalition behind the push, which has at various times included a constellation of leftist anti-war organizations such as Code Pink and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, is inveighing against legislation that would overhaul U.S. competition with China and in support of a watered-down alternative pushed by House Democrats.

The title of a press release promoting the first letter sums up the campaign’s message: “Cold War with China is a Dangerous and Self-Defeating Strategy.” The danger is that a new “Cold War mentality” has inflamed anti-Asian racism at home and thrown up obstacles to confronting international challenges in tandem with the PRC.

Effectively, the coalition seems to have given progressive lawmakers such as Ilhan Omar talking points with which to push back against ascendant China hawks in government. “We need to distinguish between justified criticisms of the Chinese government’s human-rights record and a Cold War mentality that uses China as a scapegoat for our own domestic problems and demonizes Chinese Americans,” Omar said in May, around the first letter’s release. Separately, last month, Senator Bernie Sanders penned an essay warning of a new Cold War.

The most recent letter, which Politico reported on last week, suggests that the effort is expanding, with progressive climate groups such as the Sunrise Movement and 350 Action now signed on. It expresses concern about “the growing Cold War mentality driving the United States’ approach to China — an antagonistic posture that risks undermining much-needed climate cooperation.” It also reprises the familiar progressive argument that a tougher China policy has led to hate crimes against Asian Americans, and warns that calling out Beijing’s abuses detracts from efforts to fight climate change and promote international human-rights standards.

Curiously, the letter’s authors neglect to mention just how pervasive forced labor is in China’s Xinjiang-based solar-panel industry, despite the Biden administration’s decision last month to unveil a battery of new sanctions in response to new evidence of such abuses. But even setting that problem aside, critics have rightfully been quick to take the letter’s larger argument apart.

“In fact, countering China is a far more effective and more realistic strategy for fighting climate change,” wrote Isaac Stone Fish in the Washington Post, pointing out that China is even more vulnerable to the consequences of unchecked greenhouse-gas emissions than the U.S., and that competing with Beijing could in fact lead to greater reductions in such emissions.

Another commentator, the U.S. Naval War College’s Steven Stashwick, pointed to the letter’s bizarre framing, which has a remarkable similarity with a phrase used repeatedly by Chinese officials and propaganda outlets. Using the phrase “Cold War mentality,” he explained in Foreign Policy, “consciously or not, parrots a long-standing Chinese talking point that is unlikely to make the White House more receptive to its argument.”

The letter on climate change is not the sole letter to have used the phrase; it played a prominent role in the first letter, whose rhetoric was echoed by Omar. Its appearance there was not an intentional effort to ape Chinese Communist Party talking points, according to Rachel Esplin Odell, a research fellow with the Quincy Institute, who responded to critics on Twitter that its use was the result of an editing oversight.

Odell, however, didn’t seem particularly exercised by the phrase’s inclusion, either. “Given the audience/purpose of this statement (US public/grassroots) it’s not a big problem to have some incidental (very minimal) discursive overlap with China’s arguments and may even be positive for some of the reasons Paley highlights in the above piece,” she wrote, referring to a linked article written by a Quincy Institute intern.

The truth is that no one should be taking up this rhetoric, especially when blaming Washington for the downturn in bilateral relations, because intentionally or not, doing so advances Beijing’s agenda. In recent years, the CCP has stepped up its efforts to reframe the way that diplomats discuss human rights and the international order at global forums. Chinese officials have fought for the inclusion of their preferred language — often designed to echo party talking points while sounding innocuous to Western observers — in the statements that emerge from such forums, with the ultimate goal of degrading global human-rights standards and other international norms.

“What we need to do is to abandon the Cold War mentality and the zero-sum-game approach,” said Yang Jiechi, the CCP’s top diplomat, when he berated the American delegation at high-level U.S–China talks in Anchorage earlier this year.

Whether or not it was due to pushback against the use of the same “Cold War mentality” language in the leftist groups’ first letter, the second letter in the campaign, which was meant to promote the House Democrats’ EAGLE Act, omitted the phrase. Which makes it all the more curious that last week’s letter revived it.

In a Twitter thread last week, The Intercept’s Mara Hvistendahl observed that the “new Cold War” language has been “coopted to the point where it is hard to tell which groups are legit concerned about hawkishness and which represent shadow interests,” pointing to sections on the websites of letter-writing groups that echoed Beijing’s line on a number of issues. “The point of disinformation is to muddy the waters, so that it’s hard to tell what is state meddling and what is legit organizing,” she wrote. “In that sense this campaign is a success.”

Code Pink is well-known for defending authoritarian anti-U.S. regimes of all stripes. The group’s founder, Medea Benjamin, joined demonstrators occupying the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, after Maduro-regime officials left in 2019. The same year, the nominally anti-war group sent a delegation to Iran and declared support for the Islamic regime’s development of ballistic missiles. So it is perhaps not surprising that on its website, Code Pink takes a strong pro-CCP line. On a page of frequently asked questions about its pro-China activism, the group links to a number of articles by Chinese-state-run media sources to paint a rosy picture of the situation in the country. When it comes to the party’s crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, however, Code Pink hedges, calling the situation a human-rights issue that some have coopted to “drive the cold war.”

The group has also signed onto a separate coalition called “No Cold War,” which comprises a number of likeminded activist groups. The coalition’s ongoing campaigns include, as Hvistendahl pointed out, efforts to support Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei CFO arrested in Canada for U.S. sanctions violations, and to oppose the U.K.’s ban on Chinese state broadcaster CGTN. Perhaps not coincidentally, Liu Xin, an employee of the Chinese-state-run cable-news channel CGTN, is another signatory of the coalition. (When National Review reviewed nocoldwar.com on Tuesday, the pages Hvistendahl tweeted about on July 8 and an additional page on the U.K.’s revocation of CGTN’s broadcast license had been removed.)

Maybe one day, progressive policy experts can propose a bona-fide alternative to the hawkish vision of China policy put forth by conservatives and, in a slightly different form, those in President Biden’s orbit. But the message that far-left activists are willing into existence now is not such a vision. It is empty sloganeering that, whether by design or by accident, echoes the propaganda and serves the aims of one of the world’s most dangerous authoritarian regimes.